The New York Times has done excellent reporting and editorializing on US torture at times. Only they have steadfastly refused to call it “torture,” arguing against critics that to use the “t” word would be to lose their objectivity. The utter vacuity of this argument was revealed this week in an obituary of an American serviceman who was subjected to, what by Bush administration standards, are relatively mild “torture” techniques.
From April 1953 through May 1955, Colonel Fischer — then an Air Force captain — was held at a prison outside Mukden, Manchuria. For most of that time, he was kept in a dark, damp cell with no bed and no opening except a slot in the door through which a bowl of food could be pushed. Much of the time he was handcuffed. Hour after hour, a high-frequency whistle pierced the air. [Emphasis added by Glenn Greenwald.]
Since the vile acts were done by other, Chinese in this case, there was no question that this service member was tortured.
In elite American thinking, torture thus depends on who the perpetrator and who the victim is, the Times reveals. That, after all, was the real subtext of the Office of Legal Counsel “torture memos”: It’s not torture because our government wants to do it, and our government doesn’t torture, by definition.
Also, using the editorial standards ofAmerica’s journalistic institutions — as explained recently by the NYT Public Editor — shouldn’t this be called ”torture” rather than torture — or “harsh tactics some critics decry as torture”? Why are the much less brutal methods used by the Chinese on Fischer called torture by the NYT, whereas much harsher methods used by Americans do not merit that term? Here we find what is clearly the single most predominant fact shaping our political and media discourse: everything is different, and better, when we do it. In fact, it is that exact mentality that was and continues to be the primary justification for our torture regime and so much else that we do.
Along those same lines, I learned from reading The New York Times this week (via The New Yorker‘s Amy Davidson) that Iraq is suffering a very serious problem. Tragically, that country is struggling with what the Times calls a “culture of impunity.” What this means is that politically connected Iraqis who clearly broke the law are nonetheless not being prosecuted because of their political influence! Even worse, protests the NYT, there have been “cases dismissed in the past few years as a result of a government amnesty and a law dating to 1971 that allows ministers to grant immunity to subordinates accused of corruption.” And the best part? This: ”The United States is pressing the Iraqi government to repeal that law.”
Thankfully, we’re teaching the Iraqis what it means to be a “nation of laws.” We Americans know how terrible it is to have a system where the politically powerful are permitted to break the law and not be held accountable. A country which does things like that can fall into such a state of moral depravity that they would actually allow people to do things like this and get away with it. Who could imagine living in a place like that?
Psychologist Armond Aserinsky wrote very movingly to a listserv of his experience as a young veteran conducting interviews with other veterans recently returned from war. His writing highlights the severe emotional toll that war takes on the soldiers we send to fight. Armond has kindly given me permission to reproduce his piece here:
Dear group,
As a recently discharged veteran of the Vietnam War and brand new Psych Grad Student I was offered a special research assistantship that required me to interview the gravely injured soldiers undergoing treatment at The Valley Forge Military Hospital, in Phoenixville, Pennsylvania. Talk about jumping into the pool at the deep end without having had any swimming lessons. But the project leader needed my understanding of and credibility with the military to gain access to this very “sensitive” population.
Let me say that the lessons I learned over those months have never been forgotten. While I know a lot more now than I did back then (in a lot of ways), I’ve never come to regard those raw observations as wrong. What I saw, in a nutshell, is that the military tried to do a very good job patching those young soldiers together PHYSICALLY, but the mental health aspects were woefully undertreated.
During the acute phase of hospitalization, and the months of convalescent hospital care, some efforts were made to engage the patients in various kinds of support groups. While the expertise of the fellow heading up the MH side of the clinical team was well below that of the medical members, that young social worker was a very brave and compassionate man who did some real good. The real problem was not at this point in the treatment process.
What was wrong, and still is, was the complete lack of recognition that these soldiers’ lives had been permanently derailed. The sense of loss, the unremitting nature of the injuries, comes to have a grinding, corrosive effect on the sense of self, on coping, on relationships. What bullets have torn apart is often never really put together, and every wound to the flesh has a mental counterpart that festers in the darkness of denial and ignorance.
I know that today’s soldiers receive miraculous treatments for injuries that killed their predecessors in the field. Yet one gets the same impression now that I had way back when: an injured serviceman is offered “help if he should need it”, as if MH sequela were rare and rather unexpected. Instead of a lifetime program of benefits and active support, the soldier receives a set of patches when obvious tears in his physical or mental fabric develop. “Oh, so you’re drinking a case of beer a night? We’ve got a D & A counselor you can see down here at the V. A.”
Of course the damage to minds is not limited to those who’ve been shot up or partially blown apart. That’s what the letter to Mrs. Obama is meant to address. What I’m proposing is that just about everyone who’s had to be stitched together ought to be regarded as an MH casualty in need of some system of support that doesn’t require a fellow to shoot somebody or fall down drunk before a sliver of help is offered. For those who were lucky enough to get through the bloodbath in one piece, the numbers are only slighter better.
We owe it to take real care of each person who Dick Cheney and all the other chicken hawks sent out to fight their foolish wars. Real care means recognizing up front that if you were “over there” you’re going to have problems, because that’s the nature of being human.
I hope I’m making myself clear. I still carry some wounds from just being involved with the young men who gave their arms and legs for an unnecessary war and were then sent home to limp and ache and suffer for the rest of their lives, as if it were no big deal. “Come back and see us if you’re having problems.”
Revere at Effect Measurereminds us again of how fragile our public healthcare system is after years of underfunding. Even a minor flu pandemic could overwhelm the emergency rooms, leading to thousands of patients lying on gurneys out in the halls for days. Imagine also what would happen to our primary care system.
Here is revere:
Swine flu: breaking the acute care system
By revere
Maryn McKenna has a great piece at CIDRAP News today about something that should worry all of us as we wait to see if the other shoe drops with swine flu. Our acute care health services system is so brittle it won’t take much to break it:.
With the global outbreak of novel H1N1 influenza (swine flu) entering its fourth week, physicians at emergency rooms, clinics, and hospitals around the United States say they are overwhelmed with “worried well” who have as much as doubled their patient loads.All the clinicians work at medical centers that have planned and practiced for pandemics and disasters. But the crisis has exposed a weak point that their preparation could not influence: a crush of fearful patients seeking reassurance, many of them sent to emergency rooms (ERs) for tests by workplaces, schools, and busy primary care physicians.
Those who have been dealing with the onslaught say it should serve as a warning. If this flu strain or another becomes more virulent—causing more serious disease than it now does, and presumably also inspiring more panic—the healthcare system will not be able to handle the demand.
[snip]
Yet hospitals and emergency departments have been shrinking, while their patient populations have been growing. The Institute of Medicine calculated in 2006 that ER visits rose by 26% between 1992 and 2003, from 89.8 million to 114 million in a year, while 425 emergency departments and 703 hospitals closed and the number of hospital beds in use shrank by 198,000.
And last month, the American Hospital Association said that bed closures and layoffs were accelerating because of the economic crash. Half of 1,078 hospitals surveyed in March said they were seeing increased numbers of uninsured patients in their ERs, and approximately 10 hospitals per month were laying off 50 staff or more.
“My hospital has almost no surge capacity; it is running full all the time,” [Dr. Edward Panacek, a professor of emergency medicine at University of California-Davis Medical Center] said. “If we had a 10% increase in the need for admissions because of flu, we would have nowhere in the hospital to put those patients. They would back up in the ER, and they would lie on gurneys for days.”
Simultaneously, the public health system, which could relieve some pandemic stress by coordinating triage and testing, is experiencing sharp losses of its own. More than 11,000 jobs were eliminated in state and local health departments in 2008 due to budget cuts, according to a letter to Congress written in February by a coalition of public health organizations, and another 10,000 positions are expected to go unfilled this year. (Maryn McKenna, CIDRAP News)
The other day I asked a colleague who specializes in these things to get me some data on staffed hospital beds today versus the last pandemic (1968). As I suspected we are considerably worse off now. At the time of the 1968 pandemic the US had about 4 “beds set up and staffed” for every 1000 people. In 2007 it was only 2.7. The difference of 1.3 beds/thousand translates into about 400,000 less staffed beds today than if we had the same per capita as 1968 (even in absolute terms it is about 50,000 fewer beds). I stressed staffed beds because as nurses are fond of saying, beds don’t take care of patients, nurses do. It turns out that we are even worse off than these data suggest. My informant said that of the estimated 800,000 beds listed in the American Hospital Association Guide Issue on Hospital Statistics (his source for the tables he gave me), maybe only two-thirds are actually staffed. The beds may be there in the facility, but if they are empty they aren’t staffed. No hospital pays to staff an empty bed. The number of staffed beds is in reality smaller. So an apparent reserve isn’t really there. Of course in a surge, it is likely hospitals would recruit back licensed nurses who today are doing non-nursing care jobs. But that would just get us back to the point where we are down 300,000 beds compared to 1968.
In addition to the worried well and the worried not-so-sick, a pandemic with effects no worse than a really bad flu season could overwhelm the ER and possibly inpatient services. Many of our health care facilities are running a t full capacity and a surge of flu cases and the worried well come on top of all the “usual” emergencies: auto accidents, heart attacks, acute asthmatic episodes, etc. They still have to be taken care of.
The question is whether our health care system and Congress will treat the swine flu episode as a wake-up call or just hit the snooze button and go back to sleep.
The New York Timesreports today on a new study on the negative health effects of losing one’s job. The key finding:
Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared to people who were continuously employed.
Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.
Thus, it appears to be losing the job and its attendant stresses that is the causal factor and not unemployment per se. Thus, the Times headline is deceptive and detracts from the true finding.
Here is the complete article:
Unemployment May Be Hazardous to Your Health
By Roni Caryn Rabin
Even as the U.S. Labor Department released figures showing that the economy lost more than half a million jobs in April, researchers on Friday made public a large study with an unsettling finding: Losing your job may make you sick.
A researcher at the Harvard School of Public analyzed detailed employment and health data from 8,125 individuals surveyed in 1999, 2001 and 2003 by the U.S. Panel Study of Income Dynamics.
Workers who lost a job through no fault of their own, she found, were twice as likely to report developing a new ailment like high blood pressure, diabetes or heart disease over the next year and a half, compared to people who were continuously employed.
Interestingly, the risk was just as high for those who found new jobs quickly as it was for those who remained unemployed.
Though it’s long been known that poor health and unemployment often go together, questions have lingered about whether unemployment triggers illness, or whether people in ill health are more likely to leave a job, be fired or laid off.
In an attempt to sort out this chicken-or-egg problem, the new study looked specifically at people who lost their jobs through no fault of their own — for example, because of a plant or business closure.
“I was looking at situations in which people lost their job for reasons that…shouldn’t have had anything to do with their health,” said author Kate W. Strully, an assistant professor of sociology at State University of New York in Albany, who did the research as a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation scholar at the Harvard School of Public Health. “What happens isn’t reflecting a prior condition.”
Only 6 percent of people with steady jobs developed a new health condition during each survey period of about a year and a half, compared with 10 percent of those who had lost a job during the same period. It didn’t matter whether the laid off workers had found new employment; they still had a one in 10 chance of developing a new health condition, Dr. Strully found.
David Williams, a professor at the Harvard School of Public Health who was not involved in the research, said the study is a reminder that job loss and other life stressors have a tremendous impact on both mental and physical health and contribute to the development of chronic conditions.
“We know that stress affects health,” said Dr. Williams, formerly director of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Commission to Build a Healthier America. “It causes changes in physiological function in multiple ways, and it can lead to alterations in health behavior. People no longer exercise, they eat more, they drink more. People who smoke, smoke more on high stress days.”
“There is a lot of focus on the economic downturn, but there is not much attention being paid to the health consequences of the downturn,” he added. “This study shows that it does not take a long sustained period of unemployment to see health effects.”