Psyche, Science, and Society

Michael Scheuer calling for Al-Qaeda attack on US

Just to give a snse of what we’re up against with the national security industry using fear to control public discourse, former CIA employee Michael Scheuer with Fox News‘ Glenn Beck says that the only thing that will “save the country” is for Al-Qaeda to detonate a major weapon in the US, so politicians will come to their senses and authorize brutality ["as much force as necessary"]:

1 comment July 1st, 2009

Army Field Manual on psychotropic drugs may meet torture criterion

Jeff Kaye argues, in a recent Firedoglake piece, that the Army Filed Manual on interrogations allows, in at least one instance, behavior [use of psychotropic drugs] that may have met John Yoo’s restrictive definition of torture.

The use of drugs in interrogations by U.S. agencies is, unfortunately, nothing new, but it is illegal. In the rewrite of the Army Field Manual, supervised by Rumsfeld right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, the Pentagon changed the wording around the use of drugs in interrogations to prohibit “drugs that may induce lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage.” Previously, the former AFM had prohibited “chemically induced psychosis.” So, unless that psychosis causes “lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage” — something that is not typical with the use of psychotropic, hallucinogenic, or so-called “truth” drugs, like sodium amytal — it’s presumably allowed in the current AFM.

Oddly, Yoo’s memos, which were written to provide supposed legal cover for the use of drugs and other forms of torture, appear to place the Army Field Manual’s restrictions on the use of drugs out of sync with Yoo/Addington’s legal justifications. Yoo would disallow the use of drugs that “cause profound mental harm,” that “penetrate to the core of an individual’s ability to perceive the world around him, substantially interfering with his cognitive abilities, or fundamentally alter his personality,” and are calculated to that end — a fairly stringent standard.

But the Army Field Manual only prohibits the use of drugs in interrogations which would cause “lasting or permanent mental alteration or damage,” a much more permissive standard than “profound mental harm,” especially when the latter is defined as something similar to “brief psychotic disorder” (per Yoo) . Thus, when Cambone and Company, getting off on their oh-so-smart word games in the redraft of the AFM, removed the prohibition against “chemically induced psychosis” from the old AFM, and replaced it with their new formulation, then according to Yoo’s own analysis, the Army Field Manual now allowed the drugging of prisoners in a manner that would amount to torture.

July 1st, 2009

Olympia Snowe: Public option in healthcare will save too much money

Sen. Olympia Snowe’s argument against a public option in healthcare reform, it will be too cheap for us:

“If you establish a public option at the forefront that goes head-to-head and competes with the private health insurance market … the public option will have significant price advantages.”

That is, we can’t have it, because it would save us too much that rightly belong to the insurance industry!

1 comment July 1st, 2009