Psyche, Science, and Society

It’s torture when others do it, according to Washington Post

In a major exposure of media hypocrisy, Jason Linkins points out that the Washington Post Finally Describes Waterboarding As Torture (When Someone Else Does It):

Here’s some unique writing from the Washington Post, in an article about a man named Kaing Khek Lev, or “Duch,” a notorious genocidaire of the Khmer Rouge, who this week took responsibility for his crimes, namely running “the Khmer Rouge’s most notorious torture center, Tuol Sleng in Phnom Penh,” where an “estimated 16,000 men, women and children died.” Now, we’ve read a lot of descriptions of torture in the Washington Post, but some editor allowed reporter Tim Johnston to file an extraordinary rendition:

The prosecution described a chain of death operated by Duch. His victims — most of whom were either disgraced members of the Khmer Rouge or their families — were tortured with electric shocks, waterboarding or beating to extract a confession, which would implicate new victims. After confessing, the victims would be killed, most often by a sharp blow to the back of the head.

“There were autopsies carried out on live persons, there was medical experimentation, and people were bled to death: These were all crimes against humanity admitted by Duch,” the prosecutors charged in the indictment. Among the four forms of torture he officially condoned, they said, was pouring water up victims’ noses.
Wow. You see what Johnston did there, right? He called waterboarding “torture.” He specifically called “pouring water up victims’ noses”…torture.

It’s a break from typical media traditions, obviously. See, when outfits like the WaPo typically talk about waterboarding, it’s referred to as “a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime” or “harsh interrogation tactics” or an “interrogation tactic” or “harsh interrogation practices” or “a practice that years later would be condemned as torture by Democrats and some Republicans on Capitol Hill.” But unless you are in possession of whatever gland produces honesty, like Dan Froomkin, you never, never, ever just come right out and say that waterboarding is torture.
I guess it becomes “torture” when it’s being done by genocidal Communist madmen, whose political ideology lacks the beautiful exceptionalism that normally transforms an abhorrent and inhumane act into a patriotic gesture. At least I think that’s the equation. I’m willing to revisit this position if, say, Ruth Marcus puts on her Inanity Cap and pens a piece about how we should give Duch a break because SURELY, when he was torturing and killing people in Phnom Penh, he was acting “not with criminal intent, but in the belief that they had grants of authority reaching to the highest levels of government.”…

For, as we now know, the US government never tortures.

1 comment March 31st, 2009

Stress a biological link between childhood poverty and adult cognition

A new study provides evidence that childhood poverty may affect adult cognitive functioning at least partly through biological mechanisms [elevated stress hormones in childhood]. At a time when poverty of all types is rapidly rising across the world, this is deeply disturbing. We need to get elimination of poverty higher on the overly-crowded reform agenda:

Poverty Goes Straight to the Brain

By Brandon Keim

Growing up poor isn’t merely hard on kids. It might also be bad for their brains. A long-term study of cognitive development in lower- and middle-class students found strong links between childhood poverty, physiological stress and adult memory.

The findings support a neurobiological hypothesis for why impoverished children consistently fare worse than their middle-class counterparts in school, and eventually in life.

“Chronically elevated physiological stress is a plausible model for how poverty could get into the brain and eventually interfere with achievement,” wrote Cornell University child-development researchers Gary Evans and Michelle Schamberg in a paper published Monday in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

For decades, education researchers have documented the disproportionately low academic performance of poor children and teenagers living in poverty. Called the achievement gap, its proposed sociological explanations are many. Compared to well-off kids, poor children tend to go to ill-equipped and ill-taught schools, have fewer educational resources at home, eat low-nutrition food, and have less access to health care.

At the same time, scientists have studied the cognitive abilities of poor children, and the neurobiological effects of stress on laboratory animals. They’ve found that, on average, socioeconomic status predicts a battery of key mental abilities, with deficits showing up in kindergarten and continuing through middle school. Scientists also found that hormones produced in response to stress literally wear down the brains of animals.

Evans and Schamberg’s findings pull the pieces of the puzzle together, and the implications are disturbing. Sociological explanations for the achievement gap are likely correct, but they may be incomplete. In addition to poverty’s many social obstacles, it may pose a biological obstacle, too.

“A plausible contributor to the income-achievement gap is working-memory impairment in lower-income adults caused by stress-related damage to the brain during childhood,” they wrote.

To test their hypothesis, Evans and Schamberg analyzed the results of their earlier, long-term study of stress in 195 poor and middle-class Caucasian students, half male and half female. In that study, which found a direct link between poverty and stress, students’ blood pressure and stress hormones were measured at 9 and 13 years old. At 17, their memory was tested.

Given a sequence of items to remember‚ teenagers who grew up in poverty remembered an average of 8.5 items. Those who were well-off during childhood remembered an average of 9.44 items. So-called working memory is considered a reliable indicator of reading, language and problem-solving ability — capacities critical for adult success.

When Evans and Schamberg controlled for birth weight, maternal education, parental marital status and parenting styles, the effect remained. When they mathematically adjusted for youthful stress levels, the difference disappeared.

In lab animals, stress hormones and high blood pressure are associated with reduced cell connectivity and smaller volumes in the prefrontal cortex and hippocampus. It’s in these brain regions that working memory is centered. Evans and Schamberg didn’t scan their human subjects’ brains, but the test results suggest that the same basic mechanisms operate in kids.

“Brain structures change with stress and are affected by early-life stress in animal models,” said Rockefeller University neuroendocrinologist Bruce McEwen. “Now there are beginnings of work on our own species. The Evans paper is an important step in that direction.”

McEwen also noted that, at least in animals, the effects of stress produce changes in genes that are then passed from parent to child. Poverty’s effects could be hereditary.

The findings, though compelling, still need to be replicated and refined. “They’re not really saying which causal events were stressful. They’re just measuring biological markers of stress,” said Kim Noble, a University of Pennsylvania psychobiologist who studies the relationship between child poverty and cognition. Other mental consequences of poverty also need to be measured.

“I think that different cognitive outcomes have different causes,” said Noble. “Something like working memory might be more associated with stress, whereas language might be associated with hours spent reading to your children.”

But Noble still said the study “was very well-done. They have an impressive data set.” And though some details remain incomplete, she said, evidence of connections between poverty and neurobiology are strong enough to justify real-world testing.

“Policy changes that affect environments that might affect cognitive development and brain change — that’s the ultimate future of the field,” she said.

**********

Citation: “Childhood poverty, chronic stress, and adult working memory.” By Gary W. Evans and Michelle A. Schamberg.  Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, Vol. 106 No. 13, March 30, 2009.

March 31st, 2009

Two views on the bank bailout

Two alternative views on the baking crisis.  At TPMCafe, Bernard Avishai is unconvinced by Paul Krugman’s concerns, and asks Two Lingering Questions for Krugman:

So the first question is this: Given how much faster financial capital and entrepreneurial information move today than they did in the 1930s, or even in Japan in the 1990s, can we not assume that the pace, not only of decline, but recovery, too, will be much faster than any historical precedent? The president implied that he thought so in his “Sixty Minutes” interview last week, when he spoke of how “wired” the world has become….

So the second question is this: Do bankers, for all their faults and grotesque enrichment, know some important, subtle things about managing risk, assessing business plans, providing financial services, and so forth that we dare not lose during the process of recovery? Is there not real know-how here, not just know-about (that is, insider stuff, like ways of betting against “AIG’s book”)?

At the Atlantic, however, in The Quiet Coup, former IMF chief economist Simon Johnson sees strong similarities between major crises in developing countries and the US crisis:

In its depth and suddenness, the U.S. economic and financial crisis is shockingly reminiscent of moments we have recently seen in emerging markets (and only in emerging markets): South Korea (1997), Malaysia (1998), Russia and Argentina (time and again). In each of those cases, global investors, afraid that the country or its financial sector wouldn’t be able to pay off mountainous debt, suddenly stopped lending. And in each case, that fear became self-fulfilling, as banks that couldn’t roll over their debt did, in fact, become unable to pay. This is precisely what drove Lehman Brothers into bankruptcy on September 15, causing all sources of funding to the U.S. financial sector to dry up overnight. Just as in emerging-market crises, the weakness in the banking system has quickly rippled out into the rest of the economy, causing a severe economic contraction and hardship for millions of people.

But there’s a deeper and more disturbing similarity: elite business interests—financiers, in the case of the U.S.—played a central role in creating the crisis, making ever-larger gambles, with the implicit backing of the government, until the inevitable collapse. More alarming, they are now using their influence to prevent precisely the sorts of reforms that are needed, and fast, to pull the economy out of its nosedive. The government seems helpless, or unwilling, to act against them.

Johnson concludes, rather pessimistically:

The conventional wisdom among the elite is still that the current slump “cannot be as bad as the Great Depression.” This view is wrong. What we face now could, in fact, be worse than the Great Depression—because the world is now so much more interconnected and because the banking sector is now so big. We face a synchronized downturn in almost all countries, a weakening of confidence among individuals and firms, and major problems for government finances. If our leadership wakes up to the potential consequences, we may yet see dramatic action on the banking system and a breaking of the old elite. Let us hope it is not then too late.

March 31st, 2009

Progressive Jews say calling for Israeli boycott not antisemitic

Progressive Jews in Europe, Israel, and North America unite against idea that calling for a boycott of Israel is antisemitic. [Note, I signed.]:

We are peace activists of Jewish background. Some of us typically identify in this way; others of us do not. But we all object to those who claim to speak for all Jews or who use charges of anti-Semitism to attempt to squelch legitimate dissent.

We have learned with dismay the allegations regarding Hermann Dierkes, a trade unionist and leader of the Left Party (DIE LINKE) in the German city of Duisburg. Dierkes, in response to the recent Israeli assault on Gaza expressed the view that one way people could help Palestinians obtain justice would be to support the call of the World Social Forum to boycott Israeli goods, so as to put pressure on the Israeli government.

Dierkes has been subjected to widespread and vitriolic denunciations for anti-Semitism, and accused of calling for a repeat of the Nazi policy of the 1930s of boycotting Jewish products. Dierkes responded that “The demands of the World Social Forum have nothing in common with Nazi-type racist campaigns against Jews, but aim at changing the Israeli government’s policy of oppression of the Palestinians.”

No one has made any claims of anti-Semitism against Dierkes for anything other than his support of the boycott. Yet he has been accused of “pure anti-Semitism” (Dieter Graumann the Vice-President of the Central Jewish Council), of uttering words comparable to “a mass execution at the edge of a Ukrainian forest” (Westdeutsche Allgemeine Zeitung editorialist Achim Beer), and of expressing “Nazi propaganda” (Hendrik Wuest, General Secretary of the Christian Democratic Party).

We signatories have differing views on the wisdom and efficacy of calling for a boycott of Israeli goods. Some of us believe that such a boycott is an essential component of a campaign of boycott, divestment, and sanctions that can end the four-decade-long Israeli occupation; others think the better way to pressure the Israeli government is with a more selective boycott focused on institutions and corporations supporting the occupation. But all of us agree that it is essential to apply pressure against the Israeli government if peace and justice are to prevail in the Middle East and all of us agree that a call for a boycott of Israel has nothing in common with the Nazi policy of “Don’t buy from Jews.” It is no more anti-Semitic to boycott Israel to end the occupation than it was anti-white to boycott South Africa to end apartheid. Social justice movements have often called for boycotts or divestment, whether against the military regime in Burma or the government of Sudan. Wise or not, such calls are in no way discriminatory.

Violence in the Middle East has indeed led to some acts of anti-Semitism in Europe. There was a call to boycott Jewish-owned stores in Rome that was widely and appropriately condemned. We deplore such bigotry. Israel’s crimes cannot be attributed to Jews as a whole. But, at the same time, a boycott of Israel cannot be equated with a boycott of Jews as a whole.

An acute and disturbing form of racism rising in Europe today is Islamophobia and xenophobia directed at immigrants from Muslim countries. Dierkes has been a champion in defense of the rights of immigrants, while some of those who accuse all critics of Israel of being anti-Semitic often participate themselves — like the Israeli government and state — in such forms of racism.

The Holocaust was one of the most horrific events in modern history. It is a dishonor to its victims to use its memory as a bludgeon to silence principled critics of Israel’s unconscionable treatment of Palestinians.

[We have spent just a week gathering names on this letter, circulating it only in a few countries. We apologize to all those who would have liked to sign, but didn't get a chance or whose names arrived too late for inclusion. For information on how you can help support this effort, please contact Dierkes.Letter@gmail.com.]

Signatories

(organizations listed for identification purposes only)

BELGIUM

Marc ABRAMOWICZ, Psychothérapeute

Mateo ALALUF, Professeur, Université libre de Bruxelles

Joëlle BAUMERDER, Directrice institution culturelle

Marianne BLUME, Professeur

Jacques BUDE, Professeur émérite, Université libre de Bruxelles

Willy ESTERSOHN, Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique

Fanny FILOSOF

Thérèse FRANKFORT, Professeur

Victor GINSBURGH, Professeur émérite, Université libre de Bruxelles

Tom GOLDSCHMIDT, Journaliste

Martine GOLDSTEIN, Psychologue, Université libre de Bruxelles

Henri GOLDMAN, Auteur

José GOTOVITCH, Professeur retraité

Anne HERSCOVICI, Sociologue

Miaden HERZL

Henri HURWITZ, Professeur émérite, Université libre de Bruxelles

Paul JACOBS, Professeur, Université libre de Bruxelles

Willy KALB

Daniel LIEBMAN, Romaniste

Léon LIEBMAN, Magistrat honoraire

Nicole MAYER, Professeur émérite, Université libre de Bruxelles

Henri ROANNE-ROZENBLATT, Journaliste

Dominique RODRIGUEZ, Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique

Edith RUBINSTEIN, Femme en noir

Serge SIMON, Ecrivain et Union des progressistes juifs de Belgique

Michel STASZEWSKI, Professeur

Léo TUBBAX

Elie VAMOS, Médecin

Esther VAMOS, Professeur émerite, Université libre de Bruxelles

Serge VIDAL

Jean VOGEL, Professeur, Université libre de Bruxelles

Laurent VOGEL, Professeur, Université libre de Bruxelles

Henri WAJNBLUM, Co-président de l’Union des Progressistes Juifs de Belgique

CANADA

Elizabeth BLOCK, Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism, Women in Solidarity with Palestine, Independent Jewish Voices

Corey BALSAM, Student

Julia BARNETT

Lawrence BOXALL, Jews for a Just Peace

Mark Robert BRILL

Anne-Marie BRUN

Smadar CARMON, Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism

James DEUTSCH, MD

Judith DEUTSCH, MSW, President, Science for Peace

Gordon DOCTOROW

Inge FLEISCHMANN FOWLIE, Independent Jewish Voices

Barry FLEMING

Matt FODOR

Inge FOWLIE

Daniel FREEMAN-MALOY, Activist and writer

Sam GINDIN, York University

Rachel GUROFSKY, Trent University

Larry HAIVEN, Saint Mary’s University

Jean HANSON, Independent Jewish Voices

Jake JAVANSHIR, Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism

Mira KHAZZAM, Independent Jewish Voices

Mark KLEIN

Naomi KLEIN, Author

Jason KUNIN

Richard Borshay LEE, Professor Emeritus, University of Toronto

Abby LIPPMAN, Independent Jewish Voices

Henry LOWI

Elizabeth MOLCHANY, Esquire

Rabbi David MIVASAIR, Ahavat Olam Synagogue, Vancouver

Joanne NAIMAN

Yakov M. RABKIN, Professeur titulaire, Département d’histoire, Université de Montréal

Diana RALPH, Independent Jewish Voices

R.S. RATNER, University of British Columbia

Herman ROSENFELD, Instructor, Labour Studies, McMaster University

Martha ROTH, United Jewish Voices-BC

Marty ROTH, United Jewish Voices-BC

Regine SCHMID

Alan SEARS, Ryerson University

Edward SHAFFER, University of Alberta

Sid SHNIAD, Independent Jewish Voices

Greg STARR, Jews for a Just Peace

Vera SZOKE

Judith WEISMAN

Suzanne WEISS, Not In Our Name: Jewish Voices Opposing Zionism

FRANCE

Houria ACKERMANN, Directrice de crèche

Nuri ALBALA, Avocat

Paula ALBOUZE

Paul ALLIÈS, Professeur à l’Université de Montpellier

Arlette ALVARENGA, Consultante retraitée

Simon ASSOUN, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Marc AYBES, Infographiste

Bernard BATT

Raphaël BÉNARROSH, Avocat retraité

Eliane BÉNARROSH, Mouvement contre le racisme et pour l’amitié entre les peuples

Zvi BEN-DOR, Professor, New York University (Paris, France)

Daniel BENSAÏD, Professeur à l’Université Paris 8

Jean BRAFMAN, Conseiller régional d’Île-de-France

Kurt BRAININ, Médecin

Rony BRAUMAN

Kenneth BROWN, Mediterraneans/Méditerranéennes

Alice CHERKI, Psychiatre, psychanalyste, auteure

Élisabeth CHOPARD-LALLIER, Conceptrice d’édition

Sonia DAYAN-HERZBRUN, Professeur émérite à l’université Paris 7

Gilles DERHI, Pédopsychiatre, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Sylvia EVRARD, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Mireille FANON-MENDÈS-FRANCE, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Patrick FELDSTEIN, Bureau national, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Rafael GOLDWASER

Jean-Guy GREILSAMER, Président des Amis du Théâtre de la Liberté de Jénine

Serge GROSSVAK

Bertrand HEILBRONN

Avi HERSHKOVITZ, Cinéaste

Thamara HORMAECHEA, Médecin

Gonzague HUTIN, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Bernard JANCOVICI, Professeur émérite, Université de Paris-Sud

Christine JEDWAB, Psychologue

Jacques JEDWAB

Samuel JOHSUA, Professeur émérite, Université de Provence

Nicole KAHN

Florence KERAVEC, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Maurice KERNBAUM

Daniel LARTICHAUX-ULLMANN, Documentaliste

Catherine LÉVY, Sociologue

Daniel LÉVYNE, Enseignant retraité

Michaël LÖWY, Sociologue

Françoise MALFROID

Alain MARCU, Petit fils de déporté, fils de juifs résistants

Jean François MARX

Véronique MARZO, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Pierre MAUREL

Ariane MONNERON, Ancien Chef de Clinique, Directeur de recherche au CNRS

Jean-Hugues MORNEAU, Bibliothécaire, Université Joseph Fourier de Grenoble

François MUNIER

Josiane OLFF-NATHAN, Université de Strasbourg
Perrine OLFF-RASTEGAR, Porte-parole Collectif Judéo Arabe et Citoyen pour la Paix

Martine OLFF-SOMMER, Psychologue

Henri OSINSKI

Marie-France OSINSKI

Nahed PUST, Femmes en Noir de Strasbourg

Jocelyne RAJNCHAPEL-MESSAÏ, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Sabrina RANASINGHE

Claude RAYMOND, Retraitée

Yaël REINHARZ HAZAN, co-directrice du Festival du Film et Forum International sur les Doits Humains

Suzanne ROSENBERG

Jacques SCHWEIZER, Physicien

Michèle SIBONY, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Claude SZATAN

Hannah TAIEB, Union Juive Française pour la Paix

Marlène TUNINGA, Présidente section française, Ligue internationale des femmes pour la paix et la liberté

Dominique VENTRE, Directeur de Formation Télécom

René VONWALLENBERG, Avocat
Fabrice WEISSMAN, Directeur d’études Fondation Médecins Sans Frontières

Adek ZYLBERBERG

Marie Claire ZYLBERBERG

GERMANY

Galit ALTSHULER, European Jews for Just Peace

Linda BENEDIKT

Stacey BLATT

Elias DAVIDSSON, Komponist, Menschenrechtler

Ilil FRIEDMAN, European Jews for Just Peace

Ruth FRUCHTMAN, Writer, European Jews for Just Peace

Harri GRÜNBERG, Mitarbeiter der Bundestagsfraktion DIE LINKE

Iris HEFETS, European Jews for Just Peace

Tal HEVER

Michal KAISER-LIVNE, European Jews for Just Peace

Kate KATZENSTEIN-LEITERER, European Jews for Just Peace

Jason KIRKPATRICK

Felicia LANGER

Mieciu LANGER

Jean Joseph LEVY

Edith LUTZ, European Jews for Just Peace

Jakob MONETA, früherer Chefredakteur der Zeitung Metall

Abraham MELZER, Publisher, European Jews for Just Peace

Moshe PERLSTEIN, European Jews for Just Peace

Fanny Michaela REISIN, European Jews for Just Peace

Paul Otto SAMUELSDORFF

Lawrence ZWEIG, Solidarity International

ISRAEL

Hillel BARAK, Movement Against Israeli Apartheid in Palestine

Ronnie BARKAN, Anarchists Against the Wall

Judith BLANC, Bat Shalom, Women in Black, HADASH

Matan COHEN, Tarabot

Adi DAGAN, Coalition of Women for Peace

Rotem DAN MOR, Student, Center of Middle Eastern Classical Music in Jerusalem

Yvonne DEUTSCH, Social worker and feminist peace activist

Daniel DUKAREVICH

Emmanuel FARJOUN, Professor of Mathematics, Hebrew University, Jerusalem

Naama FARJOUN

Alon FRIEDMAN, MD, Departments of Physiology and Neurosurgery, Ben-Gurion University of the Negev

Yodfat Ariela GETZ, Filmmaker and social activist

Rachel GIORA, Tel Aviv University

Angela GODFREY-GOLDSTEIN, Action Advocacy Officer, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Neta GOLAN

Vardit GOLDNER

Amos GVIRTZ, Recognition Forum

Connie HACKBARTH, Alternative Information Center

Roni HAMMERMANN, Machsomwatch

Shir HEVER, Alternative Information Center

Tikva HONIG-PARNASS

Ronnee JAEGER, Bat Shalom, Coalition of Women for a Just Peace

Jimmy JOHNSON, Israeli Committee Against House Demolitions

Matan KAMINER

Reuven KAMINER

Teddy KATZ

Hava KELLER

Adam KELLER, Journalist

Idan LANDAU, Department of Foreign Literatures & Linguistics, Ben Gurion University

Yael LERER, Publisher

Orit LOYTER

Eilat MAOZ, Women’s Coalition

Anat MATAR, Department of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University

Dorothy NAOR, Activist for justice and peace

Israel NAOR

Gilad NATHAN

Amos NOY

Adi OPHIR, Professor of Philosophy, Tel Aviv University

Amit PERELSON

Shai Carmeli POLLAK

David REEB, Artist

Andre ROSENTHAL, Civil rights lawyer

Yehoshua ROSIN

Sergeiy SANDLER, New Profile

Ayala SHANI

Kobi SNITZ, Technion

Lea TSEMEL, Attorney, SOS Torture

Roy WAGNER

Michel WARSCHAWSKI, Alternative Information Center

Sergio YAHNI, Alternative Information Center

Uri ZACKHEM

Beate ZILVERSMIDT

ITALY

Liviana BORTOLUSSI, Rete Radiè Resch di solidarietà Internazionale

Paola CANARUTTO, Medico

Giorgio CANARUTTO, Impiegato

Marina DEL MONTE, Psicoterapeuta

Ronit DOVRAT, Pittrice

Douglas DOWD, Professor of Economics

Giorgio FORTI, Professore Emerito Università di Milano

Milena MOTTALINI, Avvocata

Carla ORTONA, Funzionaria sanità

Marco RAMAZZOTTI, Funzionario Nazioni Unite, Rete Ebrei Contro L’occupazione, Jews Against Occupation

Stefano SARFATTI , Commerciante

Susanna SINIGAGLIA

Ornella TERRACINI, Insegnante in pensione

SWITZERLAND

Guy BOLLAG

Shraga ELAM, Winner of the Australian Gold Walkley Award for Excellent Journalism 2004

Dorrie ITEN, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace

Leo KANEMAN, Co-directeur Festival du Film et Forum International sur les Droits Humains

Rolf KRAUER, Gewerkschafter UNIA

Martine RAIS, Médecin

Peter STRECKEISEN, Soziologe

Ursel URECH, Lehrerin, Gewerkschaft VPOD

Sharon Weill, Ph.D. candidate in International Law, University of Geneva

Robin WINOGROND, Jewish Voice for a Just Peace

UK

Hanna BRAUN, Palestine Solidarity Campaign

Richard BRENNER, Editor, Workers Power

Haim BRESHEETH, Professor of Media and Cultural Studies

Peter COHEN, London South Bank University

Angela DALE, Jews Against Zionism

Mark ELF, Jews Sans Frontieres

Liz ELKIND, Scottish Jews for a Just Peace

Rayah FELDMAN, London South Bank University

Alf FILER

Sylvia FINZI, Jews for Justice for Palestinians

Tony GREENSTEIN , Trade unionist (UNISON)

Pete HALL

Abe HAYEEM, Jews for Justice for Palestinians /International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Rosamine HAYEEM, Jews for Justice for Palestinians/International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Dan JUDELSON, Secretary, European Jews for a Just Peace

Yael KAHN

Bernice LASCHINGER

Les LEVIDOW, Open University

Vivien LICHTENSTEIN

Yosefa LOSHITZKY, Professor of Film Studies

Moshe MACHOVER, Professor Emeritus, founding member of the Socialist Organization in Israel “Matzpen”

Hilda MEERS, Scottish Jews for a Just Peace

Diana NESLEN, Jews Against Zionism

Esther NESLEN

Susan PASHKOFF, Jews Against Zionism

Roland RANCE, Jews Against Zionism

Anna ROBIN

Shrila ROBIN

Brian ROBINSON

Miriam SCHARF

Ruth SIRTON

Inbar TAMARI, Jews Against Zionism

Norman TRAUB

Eyal WEIZMAN, University of London

Jay WOOLRICH

USA

Deborah AGRE, Middle East Children’s Alliance

Michael ALBERT, ZNet

Barbra APFELBAUM, Riverside Language Program, New York City

Rann BAR-ON, International Solidarity Movement and North Carolina Coalition for Palestine

Trude BENNETT

Phyllis BENNIS, Institute for Policy Studies

Carl BLOICE, Committees of Correspondence for Democracy & Socialism

Audrey BOMSE, Lawyer

Daniel BOYARIN, University of California-Berkeley

Lenni BRENNER

Stephen Eric BRONNER, Director of Global Relations, Center for the Study of Genocide, Conflict Resolution, & Human Rights, Rutgers University

Judith BUTLER, Professor, University of California-Berkeley

Leslie CAGAN, National Coordinator, United for Peace and Justice

Ellen CANTAROW, Writer

Barbara H. CHASIN, Professor Emerita, Montclair State University

Noam CHOMSKY, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Jill Hamburg COPLAN, Journalist

Lawrence DAVIDSON, West Chester University

Daniel ELLSBERG, Revealed Pentagon Papers, writer

Carolyn EISENBERG, Hofstra University

Judith FERSTER, Jewish Voice for Peace and BritTzedek

Michelle FINE, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Barry FINGER, Editorial board, New Politics

David FINKEL, Managing Editor, Against the Current

Norman G. FINKELSTEIN, Independent scholar

Laurie FOX

Racheli GAI, Co-editor, Jewish Peace News

Irene GENDZIER, Boston University

Jack GERSON, Oakland Education Association Executive Board

Alice GOLIN, Bloomfield-Glen Ridge NJ Peace Action

Steve GOLIN, Bloomfield College

Linda GORDON, Professor of History, New York University

Marilyn HACKER, Writer, City College of New York

Stanley HELLER, Moderator “Jews Who Speak Out”; Host “The Struggle” TV news magazine

Edward S. HERMAN, Professor Emeritus, Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania

Carol HORWITZ, “Jews Say No”

Louis KAMPF, Professor Emeritus, Massachusetts Institute of Technology

Stan KARP, Rethinking Schools

Melanie KAYE/KANTROWITZ, Queens College, City University of New York

Richard LACHMANN, University at Albany – State University of New York

Joanne LANDY, Campaign for Peace & Democracy

Jesse LEMISCH, Professor Emeritus, John Jay College of Criminal Justice

Howard LENOW, American Jews For A Just Peace

Zachary LEVENSON, University of California-Berkeley

Joseph LEVINE, Professor of Philosophy, University of Massachusetts

Mark LEVINE, Professor of Middle East History, University of California, Irvine

Nelson LICHTENSTEIN, University of California, Santa Barbara

Lawrence LIFSCHULTZ, Author and journalist

Zachary LOCKMAN, New York University

Marvin MANDELL, Co-editor, New Politics

Marilyn Kleinberg NEIMARK, co-host of “Beyond the Pale: Jewish Culture and Politics,” WBAI radio, New York

Joan NESTLE

Henry NOBLE, National Secretary, U.S. Section, Freedom Socialist Party

Judith NORMAN, Co-editor, Jewish Peace News

David OST, Hobart & William Smith Colleges

Frances Fox PIVEN, Graduate Center, City University of New York

Karen REDLEAF, International Jewish Anti-Zionist Network

Adrienne RICH, Poet and activist

Bruce ROBBINS, Columbia University

Robert C. ROSEN, William Paterson University

Deborah ROSENFELT, Professor of Women’s Studies, University of Maryland

Emma ROSENTHAL, Cafe Intifada/Los Angeles Palestine Labor Solidarity Committee

Paula ROTHENBERG, Professor Emerita, William Paterson University

Matthew ROTHSCHILD, Editor, The Progressive magazine

Rachel RUBIN, University of Massachusetts, Boston

Marjorie SCHEER, Jews for a Just Peace – North Carolina

Michael SCHWARTZ, Stony Brook State University

Alexander SHALOM, Lawyer

Beverly SHALOM, Social worker

Evelyn R. SHALOM, Health educator

Stephen R. SHALOM, William Paterson University

Sami SHALOM CHETRIT

Ira SHOR, City University of New York

Jerome SLATER, Writer

Alan SOKAL, New York University

Stephen SOLDZ, Co-founder, Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

David S. SURREY, Saint Peter’s College

Norman TRAUB

Carol WALD, War Resisters League

Richard I. WARK, Jews for a Just Peace-North Carolina

Lois WEINER, Professor of Education, New Jersey City University

Adrienne WELLER

Eleanor WILNER, Writer

Howard ZINN, Historian

OTHER

Marshall ANSELL, Sweden

David BARKIN, Mexico

Viviane COHEN, Architect, Morocco

Hans DIELEMAN, Universidad Autónoma de la Ciudad de México, Mexico

Mary ELDIN, Ireland

Dror FEILER, Musician, Chairperson of European Jews for a Just Peace and Judar för Israelisk Palestinsk Fred, Sweden

Jacques HERSH, Professor Emeritus, Denmark

Zachris JÄNTTI, Finland

Jakob LINDBERG, Judar för Israelisk Palestinsk Fred, Sweden

Margot SALOM, Palestinian & Jewish Unity for Justice and Peace, Australia

March 30th, 2009

Greenwald on Jim Webb’s brave call for criminal justice reform

I never got around to posting on Sen. Jim Webb’s brave call for major reform in our criminal justice system. Well, now Glenn Greenwald’s done it for me:

Jim Webb’s courage v. the “pragmatism” excuse for politicians

By Glenn Greenwald

(updated below)

There are few things rarer than a major politician doing something that is genuinely courageous and principled, but Jim Webb’s impassioned commitment to fundamental prison reform is exactly that.  Webb’s interest in the issue was prompted by his work as a journalist in 1984, when he wrote about an American citizen who was locked away in a Japanese prison for two years under extremely harsh conditions for nothing more than marijuana possession.  After decades of mindless “tough-on-crime” hysteria, an increasingly irrational “drug war,” and a sprawling, privatized prison state as brutal as it is counter-productive, America has easily surpassed Japan — and virtually every other country in the world — to become what Brown University Professor Glenn Loury recently described as a “a nation of jailers” whose “prison system has grown into a leviathan unmatched in human history.”

What’s most notable about Webb’s decision to champion this cause is how honest his advocacy is.  He isn’t just attempting to chip away at the safe edges of America’s oppressive prison state.  His critique of what we’re doing is fundamental, not incremental.  And, most important of all, Webb is addressing head-on one of the principal causes of our insane imprisonment fixation:  our aberrational insistence on criminalizing and imprisoning non-violent drug offenders (when we’re not doing worse to them).  That is an issue most politicians are petrified to get anywhere near, as evidenced just this week by Barack Obama’s adolescent, condescending snickering when asked about marijuana legalization, in response to which Obama gave a dismissive answer that Andrew Sullivan accurately deemed “pathetic.”  Here are just a few excerpts from Webb’s Senate floor speech this week (.pdf) on his new bill to create a Commission to study all aspects of prison reform:

Let’s start with a premise that I don’t think a lot of Americans are aware of. We have 5% of the world’s population; we have 25% of the world’s known prison population. We have an incarceration rate in the United States, the world’s greatest democracy, that is five times as high as the average incarceration rate of the rest of the world. There are only two possibilities here: either we have the most evil people on earth living in the United States; or we are doing something dramatically wrong in terms of how we approach the issue of criminal justice. . . .

The elephant in the bedroom in many discussions on the criminal justice system is the sharp increase in drug incarceration over the past three decades. In 1980, we had 41,000 drug offenders in prison; today we have more than 500,000, an increase of 1,200%. The blue disks represent the numbers in 1980; the red disks represent the numbers in 2007 and a significant percentage of those incarcerated are for possession or nonviolent offenses stemming from drug addiction and those sorts of related behavioral issues. . . .

In many cases these issues involve people’s ability to have proper counsel and other issues, but there are stunning statistics with respect to drugs that we all must come to terms with. African-Americans are about 12% of our population; contrary to a lot of thought and rhetoric, their drug use rate in terms of frequent drug use rate is about the same as all other elements of our society, about 14%. But they end up being 37% of those arrested on drug charges, 59% of those convicted, and 74% of those sentenced to prison by the numbers that have been provided by us. . . .

Another piece of this issue that I hope we will address with this National Criminal Justice Commission is what happens inside our prisons. . . . We also have a situation in this country with respect to prison violence and sexual victimization that is off the charts and we must get our arms around this problem. We also have many people in our prisons who are among what are called the criminally ill, many suffering from hepatitis and HIV who are not getting the sorts of treatment they deserve.

Importantly, what are we going to do about drug policy – the whole area of drug policy in this country?

And how does that affect sentencing procedures and other alternatives that we might look at?

Webb added that ”America’s criminal justice system has deteriorated to the point that it is a national disgrace” and “we are locking up too many people who do not belong in jail.”

It’s hard to overstate how politically thankless, and risky, is Webb’s pursuit of this issue — both in general and particularly for Webb.  Though there has been some evolution of public opinion on some drug policy issues, there is virtually no meaningful organized constituency for prison reform.  To the contrary, leaving oneself vulnerable to accusations of being “soft on crime” has, for decades, been one of the most toxic vulnerabilities a politician can suffer (ask Michael Dukakis).  Moreover, the privatized Prison State is a booming and highly profitable industry, with an army of lobbyists, donations, and other well-funded weapons for targeting candidates who threaten its interests.

Most notably, Webb is in the Senate not as an invulnerable, multi-term political institution from a safely blue state (he’s not Ted Kennedy), but is the opposite:  he’s a first-term Senator from Virginia, one of the “toughest” “anti-crime” states in the country (it abolished parole in 1995 and is second only to Texas in the number of prisoners it executes), and Webb won election to the Senate by the narrowest of margins, thanks largely to George Allen’s macaca-driven implosion.  As Ezra Klein wrote, with understatement:  “Lots of politicians make their name being anti-crime, which has come to mean pro-punishment. Few make their name being pro-prison reform.”

For a Senator like Webb to spend his time trumpeting the evils of excessive prison rates, racial disparities in sentencing, the unjust effects of the Drug War, and disgustingly harsh conditions inside prisons is precisely the opposite of what every single political consultant would recommend that he do.  There’s just no plausible explanation for Webb’s actions other than the fact that he’s engaged in the noblest and rarest of conduct:  advocating a position and pursuing an outcome because he actually believes in it and believes that, with reasoned argument, he can convince his fellow citizens to see the validity of his cause.  And he is doing this despite the fact that it potentially poses substantial risks to his political self-interest and offers almost no prospect for political reward.  Webb is far from perfect — he’s cast some truly bad votes since being elected — but, in this instance, not only his conduct but also his motives are highly commendable.

* * * * *

Webb’s actions here underscore a broader point.  Our political class has trained so many citizens not only to tolerate, but to endorse, cowardly behavior on the part of their political leaders.  When politicians take bad positions, ones that are opposed by large numbers of their supporters, it is not only the politicians, but also huge numbers of their supporters, who step forward to offer excuses and justifications:  well, they have to take that position because it’s too politically risky not to; they have no choice and it’s the smart thing to do. That’s the excuse one heard for years as Democrats meekly acquiesced to or actively supported virtually every extremist Bush policy from the attack on Iraq to torture and warrantless eavesdropping; it’s the excuse which even progressives offer for why their political leaders won’t advocate for marriage equality or defense spending cuts; and it’s the same excuse one hears now to justify virtually every Obama “disappointment.”

Webb’s commitment to this unpopular project demonstrates how false that excuse-making is –  just as it was proven false by Russ Feingold’s singular, lonely, October, 2001 vote against the Patriot Act and Feingold’s subsequent, early opposition to the then-popular Bush’s assault on civil liberties, despite his representing the purple state of Wisconsin.  Political leaders have the ability to change public opinion by engaging in leadership and persuasive advocacy.  Any cowardly politician can take only those positions that reside safely within the majoritiarian consensus.  Actual leaders, by definition, confront majoritarian views when they are misguided and seek to change them, and politicians have far more ability to affect and change public opinion than they want the public to believe they have.

The political class wants people to see them as helpless captives to immutable political realities so that they have a permanent, all-purpose excuse for whatever they do, so that they are always able to justify their position by appealing to so-called “political realities.”  But that excuse is grounded in a fundamentally false view of what political leaders are actually capable of doing in terms of shifting public opinion, as NYU Journalism Professor Jay Rosen explained when I interviewed him about his theories of how political consensus is maintained and manipulated:

GG:  One of the points you make is that it’s not just journalists who define what these spheres [of consensus, legitimate debate and deviance] encompass. You argue that politicians, political actors can change what’s included in these spheres based on the positions that they take. And in some sense, you could even say that that’s kind of what leadership is — not just articulating what already is within the realm of consensus, which anyone can do, but taking ideas that are marginalized or within the sphere of deviance and bringing them into the sphere of legitimacy. How does that process work?  How do political actors change those spheres?

JR: Well, that’s exactly what leadership is. And I think it’s crippling sometimes to our own sense of efficacy in politics and media, if we assume that the media has all of the power to frame the debate and decide what consensus is, and consign things to deviant status. That’s not really true. That’s true under conditions of political immobilization, leadership default, a rage for normalcy, but in ordinary political life, leaders, by talking about things, make them legitimate. Parties, by pushing for things, make them part of the sphere of debate. Important and visible people can question consensus, and all of a sudden expand it. These spheres are malleable; if the conversation of democracy is alive and if you make your leaders talk about things, it becomes valid to talk about them.

And I really do think there’s a self-victimization that sometimes goes on, but to go back to the beginning of your question, there’s something else going on, which is the ability to infect us with notions of what’s realistic is one of the most potent powers press and political elites have. Whenever we make that kind of decision — “well it’s pragmatic, let’s be realistic” — what we’re really doing is we’re speculating about other Americans, our fellow citizens, and what they’re likely to accept or what works on them or what stimuli they respond to. And that way of seeing other Americans, fellow citizens, is in fact something the media has taught us; that is one of the deepest lessons we’ve learned from the media even if we are skeptics of the MSM.

And one of the things I see on the left that really bothers me is the ease with which people skeptical of the media will talk about what the masses believe and how the masses will be led and moved in this way that shows me that the mass media tutors them on how to see their fellow citizens. And here the Internet again has at least some potential, because we don’t have to guess what those other Americans think. We can encounter them ourselves, and thereby reshape our sense of what they think. I think every time people make that judgment about what’s realistic, what they’re really doing is they’re imagining what the rest of the country would accept, and how other people think, and they get those ideas from the media.

We’ve been trained how we talk about our political leaders primarily by a media that worships political cynicism and can only understand the world through political game-playing.  Thus, so many Americans have been taught to believe not only that politicians shouldn’t have the obligation of leadership imposed on them — i.e., to persuade the public of what is right — but that it’s actually smart and wise of them to avoid positions they believe in when doing so is politically risky.

People love now to assume the role of super-sophisticated political consultant rather than a citizen demanding actions from their representatives.  Due to the prism of gamesmanship through which political pundits understand and discuss politics, many citizens have learned to talk about their political leaders as though they’re political strategists advising their clients as to the politically shrewd steps that should be taken (“this law is awful and unjust and he was being craven by voting for it, but he was absolutely right to vote for it because the public wouldn’t understand if he opposed it”), rather than as citizens demanding that their public servants do the right thing (“this law is awful and unjust and, for that reason alone, he should oppose it and show leadership by making the case to the public as to why it’s awful and unjust”).

It may be unrealistic to expect most politicians in most circumstances to do what Jim Webb is doing here (or what Russ Feingold did during Bush’s first term).  My guess is that Webb, having succeeded in numerous other endeavors outside of politics, is not desperate to cling to his political office, and he has thus calculated that he’d rather have six years in the Senate doing things he thinks are meaningful than stay there forever on the condition that he cowardly renounce any actual beliefs.  It’s probably true that most career politicians, possessed of few other talents or interests, are highly unlikely to think that way.

But the fact that cowardly actions from political leaders are inevitable is no reason to excuse or, worse, justify and even advocate that cowardice.  In fact, the more citizens are willing to excuse and even urge political cowardice in the name of “realism” or “pragmatism” (“he was smart to take this bad, unjust position because Americans are too stupid or primitive for him to do otherwise and he needs to be re-elected”), the more common that behavior will be.  Politicians and their various advisers, consultants and enablers will make all the excuses they can for why politicians do what they do and insist that public opinion constrains them to do otherwise.  That excuse-making is their role, not the role of citizens.  What ought to be demanded of political officials by citizens is precisely the type of leadership Webb is exhibiting here.

UPDATE:  Three related points:

(1) John Cole attacks those who were angry about Obama’s marijuana answer by arguing that it was unrealistic to expect Obama to say “yes” to the question.  But as I told Cole in an email just now, I don’t think anyone expected him to advocate legalization or was angry that he didn’t.  It was his mocking, childish snickering about the issue and his refusal to address it seriously (even if to explain why he didn’t favor legalization) that prompted the objections.  My email to Cole is here.

(2) An angry emailer chides me for calling Webb’s proposal one of “prison reform,” as that actually diminishes the scope of what Webb is doing, and says instead that Webb’s proposal is really one to reform the entire criminal justice system.  Prison reform is just one of several critical (and politically difficult) issues Webb is addressing.  It’s a fair point, as Webb’s own website — which describes his bill as one to “overhaul America’s criminal justice system — makes clear.

(3) On Friday, April 3, at noon, I’ll be at the Cato Institute in Washington to present my report on drug decriminalization in Portugal and how it relates to drug policy debates in the U.S. (I wrote about that report here, and event details and/or live video streaming are here).

March 30th, 2009

Kuutner: We have “a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street”

Robert Kuttner has one of the most stinging evaluations of the Obama administrations’ economic planning I have seen from the liberal left. He views the plan as a complete sell-out to Wall Street. A few key quotes:

What we have is something perilously close to a dictatorship of the Fed and the Treasury, acting in the interests of Wall Street….

But unlike Roosevelt, who used the public’s indignation and Congress’s support to constrain the barons of private finance, Obama’s economic team is using government funds to put the most abusive players on Wall Street back in the saddle. And Geithner and Summers, working with the Fed, are assembling their plan with no public scrutiny.

In the course of a week, the administration’s own rhetoric on the A.I.G. bonuses has shifted from “We were bound by contracts” to “This is an outrage” to “Never mind.” Wall Street was out for favor for just days.

He sets out a program for Congress, one unlikely to be undertaken by the current Congress:

Second, where is Congress? Basically, the key Democratic Committee chairman, whatever their private reservations, have been persuaded that they need to support their president and that the Geithner plan is worth a try. But at the very least, they should be asking harder questions and demanding more transparency. For instance, the Treasury needs to define tactics to game the bailout that will be be prohibited. Congress needs to know which Wall Street moguls the Treasury team met with, and exactly what they were promised. And the whole plan needs to be legislated, rather than made up on the fly by Summers, Geithner, and Bernanke.

At the very least, Congress should act now to cap the kind of windfall profits that hedge funds and private equity companies are likely to make with government bearing nearly all of the risk. There is a good precedent for this. During and after World War II, ending only in the early 1970s, there was a government agency called the Renegotiation Board. Defense Contractors had to agree to a contractual provision allowing a post-audit, after the contract was finished. If their profit exceed the stipulated amount, the government got a refund. By the same token, hedge fund and private equity bets made with government guarantees should have limits on their upside.

And before the Fed is turned into an even more potent all-purpose regulator, Congress should turn it into a true public institution–a reform project that has been deferred since Roosevelt’s day.

His stinging conclusion:

It’s possible that the Geithner plan will “work” in the sense of re-starting the Wall Street bubble machine, this time with a limitless line of direct credit from the Federal Reserve. If that happens, it will defer an even more serious day of reckoning, as the cost of the Fed’s immense credit creation comes due. But the greater likelihood is that the plan will merely enrich some speculators, but neither bring zombie banks back to life, nor get a normal banking and credit system operating again. And then the administration will need to come back to Congress, this time with less credibility, with the economy in even worse shape, having burned through more than a trillion dollars.

We were promised unprecedented openness. In the most momentous area of policy for getting the economy functioning again for ordinary Americans, we have instead unprecedented secrecy, designed by and for Wall Street. We expected better of Obama.

See also Jeffrey Sachs‘ Making Rich Guys Richer. The beginning:

In his review of the Geithner-Summers Plan to remove toxic assets from the banks, NY Times columnist Joe Nocera writes (March 28, p. B8), “As for the complaint that it will make rich guys richer, well, you can’t win ‘em all.” If Nocera had looked at alternatives that many of us have been suggesting and if he still concluded that helping rich guys get richer was the only conceivable strategy, his attitude might be acceptable. But he does no such thing. He did not explore alternatives. Nor did he explain to his readers that the taxpayer transfers to make “rich guys richer” could amount to tens, or hundreds, of billions of dollars of the public’s money, massive transfers that are avoidable.

And the conclusion:

We all know the end of the story as it’s now being written with an overpriced rescue of the banks. When it comes time for health care reform, education funding, infrastructure rebuilding, and (heaven forbid) help for the world’s poor and dying people, there will be no fiscal space. Budgets will be tight. Spending that helps make rich guys richer while leaving the poor to die of hunger and disease seems to be par for the course in our Wall-Street-besotted public policy.

Last week I stood in a village in Africa where the mines had closed and people had nothing to eat. Pleading eyes looked into mine. Those are the eyes that I still see when I read Nocera’s flippant acceptance of shoveling taxpayer funds to the undeserving rich.

March 30th, 2009

Charles Dickens on solitary confinement

After a visit to an American prison where total solitary confinement was practiced Dickens wrote:

I believe that very few men are capable of estimating the immense amount of torture and agony which this dreadful punishment, prolonged for years, inflicts upon the sufferers; and in guessing at it myself, and in reasoning from what I have seen written upon their faces, and what to my certain knowledge they feel within, I am only the more convinced that there is a depth of terrible endurance in which none but the sufferers themselves can fathom, and which no man has a right to inflict upon his fellow creature. I hold this slow and daily tampering with the mysteries of the brain to be immeasurably worse than any torture of the body; and because its ghastly signs and tokens are not so palpable to the eye and sense of touch as scars upon the flesh; because its wounds are not upon the surface, and it extorts few cries that human ears can hear; therefore the more I denounce it, as a secret punishment which slumbering humanity is not roused up to stay.

March 30th, 2009

Torture of Abu Zubaida, designed by psychologists, yielded nothing

The first of the CIA’s “enhanced interrogations,” that of Abu Zubaida,  described as “torture” in recently leaked portions of the International Committee of the Red Cross’s report on CIA interrogation tactics, led to nothing other than tens of thousands of investigatory hours wasted chasing fairy stories he told to get the pain to stop, the Washington Post reports today.  All reliable information obtained from him was obtained prior to the torture.

Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests.

The agency provided none, the officials said.

However, when the torture began, Zubaida did talk, he told, not the banal truth, but what his interrogators and their bosses wanted to hear:

Abu Zubaida’s revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological “dirty bomb” in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports.

“We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms,” one former intelligence official said.

Though the Post doesn’t say this, similar claims were reported in July 2007 by Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban in her account of the role psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen played in designing, conducting, and training for the CIA’s torture program.  Eban added the detail that the pre-torture information was obtained primarily by FBI [rather than CIA] agents.

While other accounts have disputed the Bush administration’s claims that Zubaida was an important al Qaeda figure, the Post story reports that he wan’t even an al Qaeda member until after 911:

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Further:

“He was the above-ground support,” said one former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida. “He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that’s not someone who gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous.”

The Post also reports that the idea of torturing Zubaida came, not from the CIA operatives, but from the very top:

As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried.

The pressure from upper levels of the government was “tremendous,” driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered.

“They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” the official said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’ ”

The application of techniques such as waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime — prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction.

Looking beyond the Post article, Eban, together with Jane Mayer and Mark Benjamin, reminds us that it was psychologists who developed these techniques that proved eminently able to elicit prolific, albeit false, information. as Eban expressed it:

I…  discovered that psychologists weren’t merely complicit in America’s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the C.I.A.

It appears that these psychologists based their torture program on the “learned helplessness” theories of former American Psychological Association President Martin Seligman. Seligman lectured to a 2002 CIA-organized meeting at which Mitchell and Jessen were present. [See Valtin on this conference] While Seligman claims to be ignorant of any connection between the meeting and CIA torture policy, afterwards Mitchell and Jessen were citing Seligman’s ideas as inspiration for their work. Mayer has pointed out that Seligman must have known Mitchell and Jessen as he has recently admitted that they were in the audience for this talk.

We might also add, as the Defense Department Inspector General and the Senate Armed Services Committee reported, that it was largely psychologists that designed the abusive interrogation techniques for the military that were implemented at Guantanamo, Abu Ghraib, and elsewhere in Iraq and Afghanistan.

After the Zubaida fiasco, the CIA turned to help from the American Psychological Association [APA]. As I recently reported, they organized in July 2003 a joint APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, to which CIA torture psychologists Mitchell and Jessen were invited. At this conference they discussed, among other things:

What pharmacological agents are known to affect apparent truth-telling behavior?….

What are sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors? How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?

The APA leadership has never come clean regarding their participation in this conference and why the CIA’s top torrture consultants were invited. They have never revealed what these torture planners told the conference or what information they were provided by the assembled psychologists. Rather, the APA, when asked about these torture psychologists, simply repeats, as if a mantra, that they are not APA members and are not subject to APA ethics sanctions, as if that clears the APA. Until the APA makes all records of the conference publicly and speaks in depth of what went on there, we can only continue to suspect that they have much to hide.

Furthermore, when the APA in 2005 formed an “ethics” task force to discuss the participation of psychologists in Bush administration interrogations, one of the majority of participants from the military-intelligence establishment was Scott Shumate, who Eban places at the torture of Zubaida. While Eban claims that Shumate was disturbed by the treatment meeted out there, he nonethless remained at his CIA post for another year while the torture of Zubaida and others continued. Any disgust that Shumate may have felt did not prevent his bragging of his involvement with “several” captured, and presumably tortured, terrorists,  in a bio for consulting:

He has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists as well as numerous other terrorists ….

Thanks to the new Post article, we have further evidence that the CIA’s torture program designed by supposedly “scientific” psychologists, was worse than ineffective. Also ineffective were the policies of the APA that supposedly prevented psychologists from participating in torture. It is time that both are investigated.

Here is the Post article:

Detainee’s Harsh Treatment Foiled No Plots
Waterboarding, Rough Interrogation of Abu Zubaida Produced False Leads, Officials Say

By Peter Finn and Joby Warrick

When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods, they were convinced that they had in their custody an al-Qaeda leader who knew details of operations yet to be unleashed, and they were facing increasing pressure from the White House to get those secrets out of him.

The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.

In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida’s tortured confessions, according to former senior government officials who closely followed the interrogations. Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida — chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates — was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.

Moreover, within weeks of his capture, U.S. officials had gained evidence that made clear they had misjudged Abu Zubaida. President George W. Bush had publicly described him as “al-Qaeda’s chief of operations,” and other top officials called him a “trusted associate” of al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden and a major figure in the planning of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks. None of that was accurate, the new evidence showed.

Abu Zubaida was not even an official member of al-Qaeda, according to a portrait of the man that emerges from court documents and interviews with current and former intelligence, law enforcement and military sources. Rather, he was a “fixer” for radical Muslim ideologues, and he ended up working directly with al-Qaeda only after Sept. 11 — and that was because the United States stood ready to invade Afghanistan.

Abu Zubaida’s case presents the Obama administration with one of its most difficult decisions as it reviews the files of the 241 detainees still held in the U.S. military prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. Abu Zubaida — a nom de guerre for the man born Zayn al-Abidin Muhammed Hussein — was never charged in a military commission in Guantanamo Bay, but some U.S. officials are pushing to have him charged now with conspiracy.

The Palestinian, 38 and now in captivity for more than seven years, had alleged links with Ahmed Ressam, an al-Qaeda member dubbed the “Millennium Bomber” for his plot to bomb Los Angeles International Airport on New Year’s Eve 1999. Jordanian officials tied him to terrorist plots to attack a hotel and Christian holy sites in their country. And he was involved in discussions, after the Taliban government fell in Afghanistan, to strike back at the United States, including with attacks on American soil, according to law enforcement and military sources.

Others in the U.S. government, including CIA officials, fear the consequences of taking a man into court who was waterboarded on largely false assumptions, because of the prospect of interrogation methods being revealed in detail and because of the chance of an acquittal that might set a legal precedent. Instead, they would prefer to send him to Jordan.

Some U.S. officials remain steadfast in their conclusion that Abu Zubaida possessed, and gave up, plenty of useful information about al-Qaeda.

“It’s simply wrong to suggest that Abu Zubaida wasn’t intimately involved with al-Qaeda,” said a U.S. counterterrorism official, speaking on the condition of anonymity because much about Abu Zubaida remains classified. “He was one of the terrorist organization’s key facilitators, offered new insights into how the organization operated, provided critical information on senior al-Qaeda figures . . . and identified hundreds of al-Qaeda members. How anyone can minimize that information — some of the best we had at the time on al-Qaeda — is beyond me.”

Until the attacks on New York and Washington, Abu Zubaida was a committed jihadist who regarded the United States as an enemy principally because of its support of Israel. He helped move people in and out of military training camps in Afghanistan, including some men who were or became members of al-Qaeda, according to interviews with multiple sources, who spoke on the condition of anonymity. He was widely known as a kind of travel agent for those seeking such training.

That role, it turned out, would play a part in deciding his fate once in U.S. hands: Because his name often turned up in intelligence traffic linked to al-Qaeda transactions, some U.S. intelligence leaders were convinced that Abu Zubaida was a major figure in the terrorist organization, according to officials engaged in the discussions at the time.

But Abu Zubaida had strained and limited relations with bin Laden and only vague knowledge before the Sept. 11 attacks that something was brewing, the officials said.

His account was echoed in another U.S. interrogation going on at the same time, one never previously described publicly.

Noor al-Deen, a Syrian, was a teenager when he was captured along with Abu Zubaida at a Pakistani safe house. Perhaps because of his youth and agitated state, he readily answered U.S. questions, officials said, and the questioning went on for months, first in Pakistan and later in a detention facility in Morocco. His description of Abu Zubaida was consistent: The older man was a well-known functionary with links to al-Qaeda, but he knew little detailed information about the group’s operations.

The counterterrorism official rejected that characterization, saying, “Based on what he shared during his interrogations, he was certainly aware of many of al-Qaeda’s activities and operatives.”

One connection Abu Zubaida had with al-Qaeda was a long relationship with Khalid Sheik Mohammed, the self-proclaimed mastermind behind the Sept. 11 attacks, officials said. Mohammed had approached Abu Zubaida in the 1990s about finding financiers to support a suicide mission, involving a small plane, targeting the World Trade Center. Abu Zubaida declined but told him to try bin Laden, according to a law enforcement source.

Abu Zubaida quickly told U.S. interrogators of Mohammed and of others he knew to be in al-Qaeda, and he revealed the plans of the low-level operatives who fled Afghanistan with him. Some were intent on returning to target American forces with bombs; others wanted to strike on American soil again, according to military documents and law enforcement sources.

Such intelligence was significant but not blockbuster material. Frustrated, the Bush administration ratcheted up the pressure — for the first time approving the use of increasingly harsh interrogations, including waterboarding.

Such treatment at the hands of the CIA has raised questions among human rights groups about whether Abu Zubaida is capable of standing trial and how the taint of torture would affect any prosecution.

The International Committee of the Red Cross said in a confidential report that the treatment of Abu Zubaida and other, subsequent high-value detainees while in CIA custody constituted torture. And Abu Zubaida refused to cooperate with FBI “clean teams” who attempted to re-interview high-value detainees to build cases uncontaminated by allegations of torture, according to military sources.

“The government doesn’t retreat from who KSM is, and neither does KSM,” said Joseph Margulies, a professor of law at Northwestern University and one of Abu Zubaida’s attorneys, using an abbreviation for Mohammed. “With Zubaida, it’s different. The government seems finally to understand he is not at all the person they thought he was. But he was tortured. And that’s just a profoundly embarrassing position for the government to be in.”

His lawyers want the U.S. government to arrange for Abu Zubaida’s transfer to a country besides Jordan — possibly Saudi Arabia, where he has relatives.

The Justice Department declined repeated requests for comment.

Even before President Obama suspended military commissions at the military base in Cuba, prosecutors had expunged Abu Zubaida’s name from the charge sheets of a number of detainees who were captured with him and stood accused of conspiracy and material support for terrorism.

When they were first charged in 2005, these detainees were accused of conspiring with Abu Zubaida, and the charge sheets contained numerous references to Abu Zubaida’s alleged terrorist activities. When the charges were refiled last year, his name had vanished from the documents.

Abu Zubaida was born in 1971 in Saudi Arabia to a Palestinian father and a Jordanian mother, according to court papers. In 1991, he moved to Afghanistan and joined mujaheddin fighting Afghan communists, part of the civil war that raged after the 1989 withdrawal of the Soviet Union. He was seriously wounded by shrapnel from a mortar blast in 1992, sustaining head injuries that left him with severe memory problems, which still linger.

In 1994, he became the Pakistan-based coordinator for the Khalden training camp, outside the Afghan city of Khowst. He directed recruits to the camp and raised money for it, according to testimony he gave at a March 2007 hearing in Guantanamo Bay.

The Khalden camp, which provided basic training in small arms, had been in existence since the war against the Soviets. According to the 9/11 Commission’s report, Khalden and another camp called Derunta “were not al Qaeda facilities,” but “Abu Zubaydah had an agreement with Bin Laden to conduct reciprocal recruiting efforts whereby promising trainees at the camps could be invited to join al Qaeda.”

Abu Zubaida disputes this, saying he admitted to such a connection with bin Laden only as the result of torture.

When the Sept. 11 attacks occurred, Abu Zubaida was in Kabul, the Afghan capital. In anticipation of an American attack, he allied himself with al-Qaeda, he said at a 2007 hearing, but he soon fled into hiding in Pakistan.

On the night of March 28, 2002, Pakistani and American intelligence officers raided the Faisalabad safe house where Abu Zubaida had been staying. A firefight ensued, and Abu Zubaida was captured after jumping from the building’s second floor. He had been shot three times.

Cowering on the ground floor and also shot was Noor al-Deen, Abu Zubaida’s 19-year-old colleague; one source said that he worshiped the older man as a hero. Deen was wide-eyed with fear and appeared to believe that he was about to be executed, remembered John Kiriakou, a former CIA officer who participated in the raid.

“He was frightened — mostly over what we were going to do with him,” Kiriakou said. “He had come to the conclusion that his life was over.”

Deen was eventually transferred to Syria, but attempts to firmly establish his current whereabouts were unsuccessful.

His interrogations corroborated what CIA officials were hearing from Abu Zubaida, but there were other clues at the time that pointed to a less-than-central role for the Palestinian. As a veritable travel agent for jihadists, Abu Zubaida operated in a public world of Internet transactions and ticket agents.

“He was the above-ground support,” said one former Justice Department official closely involved in the early investigation of Abu Zubaida. “He was the guy keeping the safe house, and that’s not someone who gets to know the details of the plans. To make him the mastermind of anything is ridiculous.”

As weeks passed after the capture without significant new confessions, the Bush White House and some at the CIA became convinced that tougher measures had to be tried.

The pressure from upper levels of the government was “tremendous,” driven in part by the routine of daily meetings in which policymakers would press for updates, one official remembered.

“They couldn’t stand the idea that there wasn’t anything new,” the official said. “They’d say, ‘You aren’t working hard enough.’ There was both a disbelief in what he was saying and also a desire for retribution — a feeling that ‘He’s going to talk, and if he doesn’t talk, we’ll do whatever.’ ”

The application of techniques such as waterboarding — a form of simulated drowning that U.S. officials had previously deemed a crime — prompted a sudden torrent of names and facts. Abu Zubaida began unspooling the details of various al-Qaeda plots, including plans to unleash weapons of mass destruction.

Abu Zubaida’s revelations triggered a series of alerts and sent hundreds of CIA and FBI investigators scurrying in pursuit of phantoms. The interrogations led directly to the arrest of Jose Padilla, the man Abu Zubaida identified as heading an effort to explode a radiological “dirty bomb” in an American city. Padilla was held in a naval brig for 3 1/2 years on the allegation but was never charged in any such plot. Every other lead ultimately dissolved into smoke and shadow, according to high-ranking former U.S. officials with access to classified reports.

“We spent millions of dollars chasing false alarms,” one former intelligence official said.

Despite the poor results, Bush White House officials and CIA leaders continued to insist that the harsh measures applied against Abu Zubaida and others produced useful intelligence that disrupted terrorist plots and saved American lives.

Two weeks ago, Bush’s vice president, Richard B. Cheney, renewed that assertion in an interview with CNN, saying that “the enhanced interrogation program” stopped “a great many” terrorist attacks on the level of Sept. 11.

“I’ve seen a report that was written, based upon the intelligence that we collected then, that itemizes the specific attacks that were stopped by virtue of what we learned through those programs,” Cheney asserted, adding that the report is “still classified,” and, “I can’t give you the details of it without violating classification.”

Since 2006, Senate intelligence committee members have pressed the CIA, in classified briefings, to provide examples of specific leads that were obtained from Abu Zubaida through the use of waterboarding and other methods, according to officials familiar with the requests.

The agency provided none, the officials said.

Staff researcher Julie Tate contributed to this report.

1 comment March 29th, 2009

Spain to investigate US torture lawyers

To the shame of the US and its new President, Spain takes the lead in investigating US torture lawyers [see also comments by Scott Horton and Glenn Greenwald. Greenwald draws the parallels between the lack of accountability for torture and the lack of accountability for the economic lawlessness of our elites.]:

Spanish judge accuses six top Bush officials of torture
Legal moves may force Obama’s government into starting a new inquiry into abuses at Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib

By Julian Borger and Dale Fuchs

Criminal proceedings have begun in Spain against six senior officials in the Bush administration for the use of torture against detainees in Guantánamo Bay. Baltasar Garzón, the counter-terrorism judge whose prosecution of General Augusto Pinochet led to his arrest in Britain in 1998, has referred the case to the chief prosecutor before deciding whether to proceed.

The case is bound to threaten Spain’s relations with the new administration in Washington, but Gonzalo Boyé, one of the four lawyers who wrote the lawsuit, said the prosecutor would have little choice under Spanish law not to approve the prosecution.

“The only route of escape the prosecutor might have is ask whether there is ongoing process in the US against these people,” Boyé told the Observer. “This case will go ahead. It will be against the law not to go ahead.”

The officials named in the case include the most senior legal minds in the Bush administration. They are: Alberto Gonzales, a former White House counsel and attorney general; David Addington, former vice-president Dick Cheney’s chief of staff; Douglas Feith, who was under-secretary of defence; William Haynes, formerly the Pentagon’s general counsel; and John Yoo and Jay Bybee, who were both senior justice department legal advisers.

Court documents say that, without their legal advice in a series of internal administration memos, “it would have been impossible to structure a legal framework that supported what happened [in Guantánamo].”

Boyé predicted that Garzón would issue subpoenas in the next two weeks, summoning the six former officials to present evidence: “If I were them, I would search for a good lawyer.”

If Garzón decided to go further and issued arrest warrants against the six, it would mean they would risk detention and extradition if they travelled outside the US. It would also present President Barack Obama with a serious dilemma. He would have either to open proceedings against the accused or tackle an extradition request from Spain.

Obama administration officials have confirmed they believe torture was committed by American interrogators. The president has not ruled out a criminal inquiry, but he has signalled he is reluctant to do so for political reasons.

“Obviously we’re going to be looking at past practices, and I don’t believe that anybody is above the law,” Obama said in January. “But my orientation’s going to be to move forward.”

Philippe Sands, whose book Torture Team first made the case against the Bush lawyers and which Boyé said was instrumental in formulating the Spanish case, said yesterday: “What this does is force the Obama administration to come to terms with the fact that torture has happened and to decide sooner rather than later whether it is going to criminally investigate. If it decides not to investigate, then inevitably the Garzón investigation, and no doubt many others, will be given the green light.”

Germany’s federal prosecutor was asked in November 2006 to pursue a case against Donald Rumsfeld, the former defence secretary, Alberto Gonzales and other officials for abuses committed in Guantánamo Bay and Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. But the prosecutor declined on the grounds that the issue should be investigated in the US.

Legal observers say the Spanish lawsuit has a better chance of ending in charges. The high court, on which Garzon sits, has more leeway than the German prosecutor to seek “universal jurisdiction”.

The lawsuit also points to a direct link with Spain, as six Spaniards were held at Guantánamo and are argued to have suffered directly from the Bush administration’s departure from international law. Unlike the German lawsuit, the Spanish case is aimed at second tier figures, advisers to Bush, Cheney and Rumsfeld, with the aim of being less politically explosive.

The lawsuit claimed the six former aides “participated actively and decisively in the creation, approval and execution of a judicial framework that allowed for the deprivation of fundamental rights of a large number of prisoners, the implementation of new interrogation techniques including torture, the legal cover for the treatment of those prisoners, the protection of the people who participated in illegal tortures and, above all, the establishment of impunity for all the government workers, military personnel, doctors and others who participated in the detention centre at Guantánamo”.

“All the accused are members of what they themselves called the ‘war council’,” court documents allege. “This group met almost weekly either in Gonzales’s or Haynes’s offices.”

In a now notorious legal opinion signed in August 2002, Yoo and Bybee argued that torture occurred only when pain was inflicted “equivalent in intensity to the pain accompanying serious physical injury, such as organ failure, impairment of bodily function, or even death”.

Another key document cited in the Spanish case is a November 2002 “action memo” written by Haynes, in which he recommends that Rumsfeld give “blanket approval” to 15 forms of aggressive interrogation, including stress positions, isolation, hooding, 20-hour interrogations, and nudity. Rumsfeld approved the document.

The 1984 UN Convention against Torture, signed and ratified by the US, requires states to investigate allegations of torture committed on their territory or by their nationals, or extradite them to stand trial elsewhere.

Last week, Britain’s attorney general, Lady Scotland, launched a criminal investigation into MI5 complicity in the torture of Binyan Mohamed, a British resident held in Guantánamo.

The Obama administration has so far avoided taking similar steps. But the possibility of US prosecutions was brought closer by a report by the Senate armed services committee at the end of last year, which found: “the abuse of detainees in US custody cannot simply be attributed to the actions of ‘a few bad apples’ acting on their own. The fact is that senior officials in the United States government solicited information on how to use aggressive techniques, redefined the law to create the appearance of their legality, and authorised their use against detainees.”

None of the six former officials could be reached for comment yesterday.

In January, a former Bush administration official, Susan Crawford, admitted that some US interrogation of terrorist suspects had amounted to torture.

Yesterday, a second Bush official came forward. Vijay Padmanabhan, a former state department lawyer, said the creation of the Guantánamo Bay detention camp was “one of the worst over-reactions of the Bush administration”, along with the setting up of secret CIA prisons and “enhanced interrogation techniques that would constitute torture”.

March 28th, 2009

Music: Charlie and the MTA

[H/t revere at Effect Measure.]

Where’s the populist song for our day, expressing the rage at the bankers and their politician friends and enablers?

March 28th, 2009