Psyche, Science, and Society

Australia cancels passport of Wikileaks founder

UPDATE: I have received word that Assange’s passport has been returned to him. Score one for human rights and common decency.

Glenn Greenwald reports that Australia has now confiscated and announced its intention to cancel the passport of Wikileaks founder Julian Assange. Here is Greenwald’s account:

This is a reminder that one can’t run around exposing the secrets of the most powerful governments, militaries and corporations in the world without consequences (h/t):

The Australian founder of the whistleblower website Wikileaks had his passport confiscated by police when he arrived in Melbourne last week.

Julian Assange, who does not have an official home base and travels every six weeks, told the Australian current affairs program Dateline that immigration officials had said his passport was going to be cancelled because it was looking worn.

However he then received a letter from the Australian Communication Minister Steven Conroy’s office stating that the recent disclosure on Wikileaks of a blacklist of websites the Australian government is preparing to ban had been referred to the Australian Federal Police (AFP).

Last year Wikileaks published a confidential list of websites that the Australian government is preparing to ban under a proposed internet filter — which in turn caused the whistleblower site to be placed on that list.

The Australian document was so damaging because the Australian government claimed that the to-be-banned websites were all associated with child pornography, but the list of the targeted sites including many which had nothing to do with pornography.  That WikiLeaks was then added to the list underscores the intended abuse.

Forcing Assange to remain in Australia would likely be crippling to WikiLeaks.  One of the ways which WikiLeaks protects the confidentiality of its leakers and evades detection is by having Assange constantly move around, managing WikiLeaks from his laptop, backpack, and numerous countries around the world.  Preventing him from leaving Australia would ensure that authorities around the world know where he is and would impede his ability to maintain the secrecy on which WikiLeaks relies.

Secrecy is the crux of institutional power — the principal weapon for maintaining it — and there are very few entities left which can truly threaten that secrecy.  As the worldwide controversy over the Iraqi Apache helicopter attack compellingly demonstrated, WikiLeaks is one of the very few entitles capable of doing so and fearlessly devoted to that mission.  It’s hardly surprising that those responsible would be harassed and intimidated by governmental agencies — it’d be far more surprising if they weren’t — but it’s a testament to how truly threatening they perceive outlets like WikiLeaks to be.  I hope to speak with Assange later today and will provide more details as I know them.

May 19th, 2010

Larry James protected by Louisiana board’s Alice-in-Wonderland logic

I have covered here the dogged, albeit so far unsuccessful, efforts of Trudy Bond and a cadre of attorneys to bring some measure of accountability to psychologist Col. Larry James for his possible involvement in abuses at Guantanamo in 2003. Bond has filed ethics complaints against James with the American Psychological Association and the Louisiana psychology board. Both have refused to even open an investigation.

Bond, with the help of pro bono attorneys has been suing the Louisiana board  to get them to conduct an investigation before dismissing the case. In cash-strapped Louisiana, the state has spent untold amounts hiring private attorneys to fight this attempt at accountability for Dr. James, and for the board itself.

Columnist James Gill, tin the New Orleans Times-Picayune describes the tortured logic of the torturer protectors.

Tortured logic

By James Gill

It is the greatest catch since Joseph Heller.Say you lodge a complaint with a professional oversight board, which illegally refuses to consider it. Naturally, you decide to appeal to the courts.

But you get the bum’s rush there too. Why? Because the board did not reach a decision on the substance of your complaint, a district judge rules there is nothing to appeal.
We are waiting to see if the court of appeal in Baton Rouge, which heard arguments last week, can find a flaw in the elegant circularity of such reasoning.

Fortunately, the protagonists here are no strangers to insane thought processes. The complainant, Trudy Bond, is a shrink in Ohio, where the object of her ire, Larry James, chairs the psychology department at Wright University.

Bond wants James held to account for alleged misdeeds at Guantanamo Bay and at the Abu Ghraib prison in Baghdad. That their dispute should play out in Louisiana is not as crazy as it sounds, for James, a native of New Orleans, is licensed to practice here.

Bond filed a complaint against James in Ohio and also asked the Louisiana Board of Examiners of Psychologists to investigate claims that he was complicit in torture.

James’s alleged offenses included tipping off interrogators about prisoners’ phobias.
James, who was the army’s top psychologist at the prisons, denies any wrongdoing. Indeed he depicts himself in a memoir, entitled “Fixing Hell: An Army Psychologist Confronts Abu Ghraib,” as a hero who put a stop to prisoner abuse.

He has, however, legion detractors within his own profession and at the Harvard Law School’s Human Rights Program and the Center for Constitutional Rights, for example. Various non-profits filed an amicus brief in support of Bond after the state board summarily rejected her complaint in 2008.

The board ruled that Bond had waited too long to file her complaint, much to the bafflement of her attorneys, who pointed out it had been received comfortably within the statutory five-year deadline. They didn’t fare any better in state court, where district judge Michael Caldwell in 2009 agreed with the board that Bond had no right to appeal because the case had not been adjudicated. “A decision not to conduct a hearing into any disciplinary proceeding, whether based on an issue of law, or an issue of fact, is not an appealable decision,” Caldwell found.

At last week’s appeal court hearing, the board’s attorney, Amy Groves Lowe, continued to maintain that Bond had waited too long to file her complaint but said there was no need to address the issue because the law forbade an appeal regardless. In any case, a Louisiana court was not an appropriate forum for a Rhode Island attorney, representing an Ohio psychologist, to seek retribution for the alleged sins of the U.S. military in foreign parts.

Bond’s attorney, Linn Freedman, does indeed work in Rhode Island, but a couple of the judges said they wouldn’t hold that against her. In any case, she used to live in New Orleans and is a member of the Louisiana bar. But it should surely be regarded as outlandish, anywhere in the union, to conclude that an administrative tribunal is entitled to avoid judicial review by simply refusing to hold a hearing on any pretext, rational or otherwise. There isn’t much point in having laws to protect the public from professional incompetence or misconduct if state boards can arbitrarily decline to invoke them. If practitioners have an ethical obligation to report their peers’ misdeeds, moreover, licensing boards must be prepared to administer discipline.

Indeed, if there is a moral obligation to investigate the role of doctors and psychologists in the torture of military prisoners, state boards may provide the only opportunity.

Nobody so far as been held accountable for violating the obligation to do no harm, although it is impossible to believe that professional canons were not sometimes suspended at Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib for the sake of preventing further acts of terror.

It will be regarded in some quarters as unpatriotic to inquire too deeply, and there may not be much stomach in Louisiana for establishing what James’ role was. He professes himself nonplussed by all the fuss.

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James Gill is a columnist for The Times-Picayune.

May 19th, 2010

CDC deceived public on lead poisoning in DC water

In general, public health officials in this country do an amazing job with limited resources. While not all their decisions are optimal, or are proven correct by later events, most public health officials can be be trusted to generally act in the public interest.

During the Bush years I was afraid that one effect of the overt politicization of so many government agencies would be to reduce further the public trust in government bureaucrats. In public health, especially, control of all sorts of problems, from infectious disease to pollution, depend upon trust.

One agency that was affected by Bush-imposed bad management was the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Now the Washington Post brings an account of high  CDC officials covering up the extent of lead poisoning caused by water in Washington DC.  The effects of official lying by health officials are extremely corrosive. When a future crisis hits, people will be less willing to trust official statements. Society suffers greatly when this type of trust is eroded.

CDC misled public on health risks of lead in D.C. water, investigation finds

By Carol D. Leonnig

The nation’s premier public health agency knowingly used flawed data to claim that high lead levels in the District’s drinking water did not pose a health risk to the public, a congressional investigation has found. And, investigators determined, the agency has not publicized its later internal research showing the problem did harm children and continues to endanger thousands of city residents.

A House investigative subcommittee concludes the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention made “scientifically indefensible” claims in 2004 that high lead in the water was not causing any noticeable harm to the health of city residents. The CDC hurriedly published its analysis though officials knew the research relied on incomplete and misleading blood test results that played down the health impact, the investigation found.

The House science and technology subcommittee investigation, scheduled to be released Thursday, was spurred last year by other scientific journals and Washington Post reporting showing that the 2004 CDC analysis was missing many test results for children who had lead poisoning. With its final report, the committee reveals the missing data showed clear harm to children from the water problem — and that CDC authors knew the data were flawed and in several instances ignored clear indications that their analysis improperly played down the lead risk. It finds the CDC ultimately misled the public and failed in its primary duty.

“The leaders of the CDC lead program, keenly aware of all of these problems even before the publication of the [2004 report], failed in their public health duty to protect and inform the public,” the committee’s investigative report states. “CDC’s actions in publishing — and continuing to stand by [the report] made the problem go away for the agency and the politicians, but not for the parents and the children throughout the nation who will suffer life-time consequences from this misguided document.”

The CDC analysis was largely used to calm public fears in early 2004 during the discovery that 1 million D.C. and Northern Virginia residents had been relying on a water supply with unsafe lead concentrations for at least a year. The study, published in the CDC’s “Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report,” has since been repeatedly cited around the nation and in foreign countries as evidence that even astronomically high lead levels in water are not cause for concern.

Lead is a toxic metal long known to cause brain damage and developmental delays in fetuses and children when they or their pregnant mothers ingest significant amounts. The CDC analysis was viewed as counter-intuitive, even by some its co-authors: For several years, established researchers had found that children suffered permanent damage from very low levels of lead in their blood, and that infants drinking formula are especially vulnerable to lead poisoning from tainted water.

CDC officials said they are preparing a statement responding to the House subcommittee’s findings.

The House subcommittee’s investigation also chides CDC for not alerting the public to its more thorough subsequent study that directly contradicted its earlier claims. This 2007 research determined there was a clear link between the city’s water problem and lead poisoning in D.C. children. For example, it showed, city children with high lead in their blood were significantly more likely to live in homes with lead pipes, and after the city fixed its water treatment problem, CDC saw a “dramatic reduction” in lead poisoning in young D.C. children.

The committee also urged release of this research to alert residents to a continuing, lurking threat — in an estimated 9,000 D.C. homes where water utility crews replaced part of the lead service pipe bringing water to the house. The CDC study concluded that the D.C. Water and Sewer Authority’s $93 million effort to reduce lead risks after the 2004 lead crisis had largely backfired: Children living in homes with partial lead pipe replacements were four times more likely to suffer from unsafe levels of lead in their blood than those in homes without lead pipes.

“While still defending its hasty 2004 publication, which was based on faulty and incomplete data, CDC officials are suddenly reluctant to publish the results of the follow-up study because of data quality issues,” the committee investigators said.

The House committee went back to recover thousands of missing blood tests, when the city’s water lead levels were the highest, in 2002 and 2003. It found the number of D.C. children who suffered lead poisoning had spiked — not fallen or remained stagnant as the CDC first said — during the years when lead levels were highest in the city’s water supply.

A group of lead experts and community activist groups joined together to petition CDC to withdraw its 2004 analysis as fatally flawed. Marc Edwards, a civil engineer and lead expert at Virginia Tech who early on raised doubts at the counterintuitive findings, said it’s long past time for the agency to make amends by retracting the paper. He also recommended that Mary Jean Brown, the lead author of the paper and CDC’s director of lead poisoning prevention, step down from her position.

“The CDC paper was a publicity stunt that was used to obfuscate the harm done to D.C.’s children during the lead crisis,” Edwards said. “They should apologize for their historic betrayal . . . and for their dangerous conclusions which endanger child

Rep. Brad Miller (D-N.C.), the House subcommittee chairman, said the “scientific failings” of the 2004 report “are indisputable. The CDC should withdraw that publication.”

The House science subcommittee reserves its strongest criticisms for Brown, whose office is responsible for funding and monitoring the District’s and states’ lead poisoning prevention efforts. In the wake of the lead revelations in the District, she worked with D.C. Health Department officials to marshal facts, review blood test results of city residents and frame CDC’s response to the problem. After a compressed several-week research process, Brown led a team in publishing the conclusion that the lead problem wasn’t having a serious health impact.

Brown summarized the paper’s “main message” this way: “There is no indication that DC residents have blood lead levels above the CDC levels of concern . . . as a result of lead in the water.”

But the committee said it found evidence — including her own words — that Brown knew this claim rested on a shaky foundation. She knew that the Health Department data they used were missing thousands of blood test results in a critical period of the lead crisis. She told investigators she believed all the missing data were for low-blood levels, but she never tried to obtain the original results from D.C. labs to check.

The committee did go back to the labs for the original test results and has now learned something striking: Three times as many children had lead poisoning during this high-lead period than the CDC said, 954 instead of 315. The difference was politically significant — because it showed lead poisoning rising during the city’s water crisis, not falling or staying the same.

In one part of the 2004 report, the CDC paper presented what was dubbed the worst-case scenario by analyzing the blood of children and adults living in homes with astronomically high lead levels in the tap water — 300 parts per billion of lead, or 20 times the amount raising concern — and said not one was suffering from elevated lead in their blood. The report never mentioned, however, that Brown and her co-authors knew most of those tested had been drinking bottled water for weeks and months before their blood was analyzed, because city officials urged them to avoid the risky tap water.

In an e-mail, a public health scientist and co-author asks Brown whether they should mention this to the public, as “this may help to explain why currently none of the persons have blood lead levels above the level of concern.” It was never mentioned.

May 19th, 2010

Israel legitimates academic boycotts

I, like many others concerned about Israeli policies, have so far not supported academic boycotts of Israel, feeling that they were potentially counterproductive and were problematic. It is ironic that Israel is itself working to legitimate the tactic. They recently refused entry to Noam Chomsky, due to objections to his writings; they thus prevented him from speaking at a Palestinian university in the West Bank. Juan Cole explains the situation in an article where he also describes the spreading boycott by cultural figures, including Elvis Costello:

Apartheid Israel, Bunker Israel: Elvis Costello and Noam Chomsky

The repercussions of the brutal shooting-fish-in-a-barrel Gaza War, of the continued Israeli siege and boycott of the Gaza Strip, and of the vigorous colonization of the Palestinian West Bank by militant Israelis, continue to grow. The clear resistance of the far rightwing government of Binyamin Netanyahu to the two-state solution sought urgently by US president Barack Obama, in favor the massive and ongoing theft of Palestinian land and resources, has increasingly tarred Israel with the brush of Apartheid policies. The greatest danger facing Israel is no longer, as in the past, neighboring Arab armies, tank corps and missiles. It is a series of humiliations in the realm of cultural politics, most of them self-inflicted.

The arts community is often pioneers in symbolically protesting human rights violations that others find it inconvenient to mention. Artists are independent-minded and often financially independent, and so cannot easily be pressured.

Thus, singer Elvis Costello’s decision to join Carlos Santana, Sting, Gil Scott Heron, and Bono in boycotting Israel is likely a harbinger of things to come rather than being just an individual decision of conscience. Costello announced at his web page that:

‘ It is after considerable contemplation that I have lately arrived at the decision that I must withdraw from the two performances scheduled in Israel on the 30th of June and the 1st of July.

One lives in hope that music is more than mere noise, filling up idle time, whether intending to elate or lament.

Then there are occasions when merely having your name added to a concert schedule may be interpreted as a political act that resonates more than anything that might be sung and it may be assumed that one has no mind for the suffering of the innocent.

I must believe that the audience for the coming concerts would have contained many people who question the policies of their government on settlement and deplore conditions that visit intimidation, humiliation or much worse on Palestinian civilians in the name of national security. ‘

If some world cultural figures will not go to Israel anymore, increasingly irrational and Draconian Israeli restrictions on dissidents have excluded from Israel Jewish-American linguist and activist Noam Chomsky.

Chomsky was told that the Israeli government did not like his writings and that it objected to him speaking at Bir Zeit University in the West Bank but not in Israel proper. He accused Israel of acting like a totalitarian state.

Ironies abound here. The Likud government has by this action legitimated academic boycotts, a political technique that the British Left in particular has advocated be used against Israel itself. Those who argued against boycotting Israel earlier were able to say that it upheld academic freedom and exchange and so should not be isolated. Chomsky himself pointed out that Israel was in essence boycotting Bir Zeit University in preventing his appearance there.

(Another important point is that Israel was making this decision for occupied Palestinians. The latter have no voice in the matter, since they cannot vote for the Israeli government that rules them and decides whose lectures they may attend).

Another irony is that Chomsky could not get official confirmation that he would be permitted to enter the West Bank on a second try, and so he addressed his Bir Zeit audience by video from Amman, with Aljazeera helping out. In the region, Aljazeera has played an important role in giving a platform to a very wide range of political views, and now this Arab media outlet is more open than the supposedly democratic Israel.

The stories of Elvis Costello and Noam Chomsky illuminate two over-arching processes. Israel’s growing reputation as an Apartheid state will not result in major economic boycotts in the near term. But the step Costello took may become more and more common if the Palestinians continue to be deprived by Israel of their basic human rights. Chomsky’s story is one of self-imposed isolation on the part of Israeli officials, mired in the proto-fascist political philosophy of Vladimir Jabotinsky– the intellectual background of the Likud Party and of Netanyahu.

4 comments May 19th, 2010

Pitch me your day

A new take on the family dinner:

[H/t Balkinization.]

May 18th, 2010

The ANC eschewed torture. Why not us?

If ever there was a situation that could reasonably justify abusive interrogations, it would be liberation struggles against authoritarian regimes like apartheid  South Africa. The African National Congress faced this question in 1983. Unlike our government, they chose the path of human rights and decency, as is described in the Los Angeles Times by Albie Sachs, a key developer of their policy:

When the ANC stood up against torture
A lawyer recalls drafting, and then debating, fundamental principles for the African National Congress on how to treat captives.

By Albie Sachs

In 1983, when Nelson Mandela was in prison and his great friend and legal partner, Oliver Tambo, was leading the African National Congress in exile, I was summoned to the ANC headquarters in Zambia. On my arrival, Tambo told me they had a problem and he hoped that I, as a lawyer in the movement, could help find a solution.

The ANC, he said, had captured a number of people sent by Pretoria to infiltrate and destroy the organization, and now the ANC needed regulations on how such captives should be dealt with. I answered without hesitation that establishing rules for such circumstances would not be difficult, because there were clear-cut international standards, including a prohibition on the use of torture or cruel or inhumane punishment or treatment.

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“We use torture,” Tambo told me soberly.

I could hardly believe it: The chief organization fighting for human rights in South Africa, a cause to which so many of us had dedicated our lives, was using torture.

It was not difficult to imagine the arguments advanced to explain the use of torture. It was only being used against traitors acting on behalf of the apartheid regime, its defenders would say, and that regime was doing everything in its power to wipe the ANC off the face of the world. That threat was not imagined but real; I am typing these words today with my left hand, having lost my right arm in 1988 when South African security agents planted a bomb in my car.

But the ANC was fighting a just struggle to create a democratic and nonracial society, and it needed to remain true to the principles it was fighting for.

Some of those in our revolutionary struggle thought otherwise: You couldn’t make a revolution, they reasoned, without breaking eggs. But Tambo clearly did not go along with these arguments. He wanted my help working on a code of conduct that would regulate the manner in which captives were treated, in keeping with the humane traditions of the ANC.

That is how I came to help draft the most important legal document I have produced in my 50 years of work as a lawyer. It amounted to a comprehensive code of criminal law and procedure for a liberation movement in exile. It established that all was not fair in love, war and the freedom struggle. Accusations against alleged agents had to be proved before properly constituted tribunals, with the right to make a defense being guaranteed.

Tambo could have simply decreed these changes as president of the organization. But that was not his way. The question of what standards of treatment should be applied raised deep moral and political questions that should be debated, in his view, by the whole organization.

Tambo was a democrat in his heart and soul, a great listener who insisted on speaking last to sum up the discussion rather than first to lay down the line. In his view, openness, debate and dialogue, especially of painful issues, could only strengthen the organization.

In that sense tolerance was more than just allowing different views to be expressed. It represented an active principle of taking critical ideas seriously and engaging meaningfully with them. It was not for him to make unilateral decisions on crucial policy questions, nor to appoint the leadership of the organization. And so he called a conference in the small town of Kabwe.

With Zambian troops surrounding the hall to protect us from possible commando raids by Pretoria hit squads, ANC members spent a full day discussing the ANC statutes and what should be included in the new code of conduct. It was my duty to present and explain the proposal. I was extremely anxious about how my proposals would be received, given the arguments in favor of torture in a war situation. It turned out that there was quick agreement on the general structure and values of the document. There was only one potentially contentious issue: Should so-called intensive methods of interrogation be permitted in emergency situations?

One by one delegates mounted the platform to say no, such tactics should never be allowed. One member said that if you gave the security forces any leeway at all, they would never stop there. Another declared in a quiet voice that we were fighting for life, how could we be against life?

It was one of the finest moments of my life. There were no headlines to be gained, no posts for which people were vying. We were simply reaffirming the soul of our struggle, the kind of people we were, what it was that bound us together. Unanimously we decided that no euphemism for torture or other cruel form of treatment would be accepted.

The consequences were far-reaching. A culture of honest inquiry and a willingness to entertain doubt opened the way for the organization to wholeheartedly support the notion of entrenching a bill of rights in a future democratic South Africa.

And Tambo’s message remains relevant today: He inspired us to be on guard not only against our enemies but against ourselves.

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Albie Sachs was appointed by Nelson Mandela to be a justice on the Constitutional Court of South Africa in 1994. He retired last year. This piece is adapted from an address to the Capetown Press Club.

May 16th, 2010

Major loss to progressive public health; Effect Measure to shut down

In a great loss for progressive, scientifically-based, public health efforts, revere at Effect Measure has announced the en of his regular blogging efforts. Revere wishes, understandably, to devote more time and energy to creating science rather than to explaining it to the rest of us. Thankfully, he will continue occasional blogging elsewhere.

I find myself intensely sad. Effect Measure is one of the few blogs I read daily. In its absence I won’t know where to turn for insights into the latest research on influenza, or for stimulating arguments regarding the value of observational (non-experimental) data in supporting causal conclusions.

As many of his regular readers know, revere has spent most of the last half year writing an immense center grant renewal. Let’s hope he gets it and has many opportunities to conduct high-quality science in the years ahead.

May 16th, 2010

Physicians and “medicinal liquor”

Daniel Okrent, in the LA Times, has a fascinating article on how Prohibition-era physicians and dentists profited off of writing prescriptions for medicinal alcohol, while “drugstores” rapidly expanded to fill the prescriptions. Evidently physicians were all too happy to find a new source of income:

An illegal substance sold legally
Liquor, that is. But the ‘drugstores’ of Prohibition are echoed by today’s medical marijuana dispensaries.

By Daniel Okrent

“He owned some drugstores, a lot of drugstores,” Daisy Buchanan said. “He built them up himself.” To Daisy, this was a perfectly reasonable explanation of the wealth of her new neighbor, Jay Gatsby. To her husband, more knowing about the world beyond the boundaries of East Egg, it was evidence that Gatsby had made his money as a bootlegger.

Modern readers in the grip of F. Scott Fitzgerald’s prose may not recognize the meaning of Tom Buchanan’s insight, but Fitzgerald knew his contemporaries would understand. In 1925, when “The Great Gatsby” was published, the meaning of “drugstores” was as clear as gin: Those were the places you went to get medically prescribed alcohol, a legally acceptable source of liquor during all 13 years of Prohibition.

Sound familiar? To any modern Californian, of course it does.For most of the 1920s, a patient could get a prescription for one pint every 10 days about as easily as California patients can now get “recommendations” for medical marijuana. All it took to acquire a liquor prescription was cash — generally about $3, the equivalent of about $40 today — placed in the hand of an agreeable doctor. It cost $3 to $4 more to have it filled by the local pharmacist. Dentists were similarly licensed, as were veterinarians who believed their patients too could use a belt of Four Roses bourbon.

Then as now, the adaptability of the medical profession was impressive. In 1917, as the 18th Amendment establishing Prohibition was working its way through the ratification process, the American Medical Assn. ousted alcohol from its approved pharmacopoeia, adopting a unanimous resolution asserting that its “use in therapeutics … has no scientific value.”

But the Volstead Act, which spelled out the enforcement and regulation of Prohibition, nonetheless made an exception for medicinal use, and in 1922, just two years into the dry era, the AMA demonstrated how open minds can be changed — or, perhaps, how capitalism abhors a missed opportunity. The results of a national survey of its members — a “Referendum on the Use of Alcohol in the Medical Profession” — revealed an extraordinary coincidence: The booming prescription trade had been accompanied by the dawning realization among America’s doctors that alcoholic beverages were in fact useful in treating 27 separate conditions, including diabetes, cancer, asthma, dyspepsia, snake bite, lactation problems and old age. In a word, the assertion that medicinal alcohol had “no scientific value,” from the AMA’s 1917 resolution, no longer had any scientific value. One especially agreeable Detroit physician provided these instructions on his prescriptions: “Take three ounces every hour for stimulant until stimulated.”

Pharmacists who wanted a piece of this highly profitable new business devised practices appropriate to their clientele. Those with high-end customers, mindful of the power (and profit) in brand names, dispensed the prescribed “medicine” in the distillers’ own bottles, which looked exactly as they had before 1920 except for the addition of a sober qualifying phrase on their newly printed labels: A 100-proof pint of Old Grand-Dad, for instance, still announced that it was “Bottled in Bond,” but just beneath that familiar legend appeared the improbable phrase, “Unexcelled for Medicinal Purposes.” At the bottom end of the retail ladder were operations like Markin’s, a drugstore on the north side of Chicago. After police officers apprehended a drunk emerging from the store with bottle in hand, an assistant city attorney informed Mayor William E. Dever in 1923, “The officers testified that [the liquor] burned their tongues and that when they touched their matches to it, immediately there was a flame.”

Some establishments that assumed the name “drugstore” never bothered with drugs and by no stretch of the imagination could be considered stores. At the corner of Sixth Avenue and West Fourth Street in Manhattan, the Golden Swan had been operating as a saloon for years and, as its unofficial name — the Hell Hole — indicated, none too glamorously. The site of some of Eugene O’Neill’s most prodigious drinking bouts, the Hell Hole was one of the models for Harry Hope’s hopeless bar in “The Iceman Cometh” (“It’s the No Chance Saloon … the End of the Line Cafe,” one character says. “No one here has to worry about where they’re going next, because there is no farther they can go.”) When Prohibition arrived, the Hell Hole’s proprietor closed up briefly, then claimed upon reopening that the bar was now a drugstore. Having bought off the local cops, he continued to operate just as he had before.

In Chicago, druggist Charles Walgreen saw his chain expand from 20 stores in 1920 to a staggering 525 a decade later. Along the way, Walgreen’s introduced the milkshake, which family historians have credited with the chain’s rocketing expansion. But it’s doubtful that milkshakes alone were responsible. Something Charles Walgreen Jr. told an interviewer many years later suggests another possibility. The elder Walgreen worried about fire breaking out in his stores, his son recalled, but this apprehension extended beyond an understandable concern for the safety of his employees: He “wanted the fire department to get in as fast as possible and get out as fast as possible,” Charles Jr. remembered, “because whenever they came in, we’d always lose a case of liquor from the back.”

All that “medicinal” whiskey (and rum and gin and brandy and every other imaginable liquid intoxicant) was perfectly legal. But it also made a mockery of the law, debased the dignity of the medical profession and encouraged rampant criminality, as mobsters eventually and inevitably took over much of the medicinal market. What finally straightened out the liquor business was the legalization that came with repeal in 1933 — legalization that was accompanied by a coherent and effective set of enforcement laws, a healthy boost in tax revenues (in the first post-repeal year, the federal government was enriched by the 2010 equivalent of $4 billion in alcohol tax revenue), and an honest recognition that, all too often, “medicinal” had been a cynical euphemism for “available.”

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Daniel Okrent is the author of “Last Call: The Rise and Fall of Prohibition,” just published by Scribner.

May 16th, 2010

The “black prison,” Obama’s Afghan torture center and the APA

Marc Ambinder of the Atlantic has received confirmation of the existence of the secret torture center at Bagram Air Base that the Washington Post, New York Times, and BBC have been reporting on. [Ambiner has a picture of the facility here.] He reports that the center is run, not by the Joint Special Operations Command, aws previously reported, but by the Defense Intelligence Agency’s (DIA) Defense Counterintelligence and Human Intelligence Center (DCHC) in course of proving intelligence services for task Force 714. For those with long memories, DCHC is essentially where the Defense Department stuffed the old Counterintelligence Field activity (CIFA) after the latter was “disbanded” due to several major scandals.

It isn’t clear if it really makes a difference if the “black prison” is run by JSOC or DCHC. After all Task Force 714 is itself a JSOC special ops force:

McRaven runs a secretive detachment of Special Forces known as Task Force 714 — once commanded by McChrystal himself — that the NSC staffer described as “direct-action” units conducting “high-intensity hits.” In an email, Sholtis said that because Task Force 714 was a “special ops organization” he “can’t go into much detail on authorities, etc.” But the NSC staffer — who called McRaven “McChrystal Squared” — said Task Force 714 was organized into “small groups of Rangers going wherever the hell they want to go” in Afghanistan and operating under legal authority granted at the end of the Bush administration that President Obama has not revoked.

As Ambinder reports, the Defense Department now admits that this secret Afghan prison uses interrogation techniques from the Army Field Manual’s infamous Appendix M. This appendix authorizes abusive techniques, including sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and “environmental manipulation [think freezing someone or blinding light] that often amount to torture.

Perhaps most disturbingly, Ambinder reports that there is a Top Secret Special Action Program authorizing DCHC interrogations. As Jeff Kaye pointed out in an emptywheel comment, if only Appendix M-based techniques — which are covered by the Army Field Manual — are used, why the need for a special SAP? Thus, we must wonder what, exactly, DCHC is doing at Bagram and other sites. Whatever it is, it isn’t something they want us, the public, to know about.

For those who think that President Obama banned torture centers like this, think again. Obama’s Executive Order only banned CIA secret prisons. This administration thus intended from the beginning to maintain its torture facility, only under a Defense Department label. Obama apparently was thinking ahead.

An additional aspect of this new revelation is that the fact that the prison is run by DCHC is of special interest to psychologists. Over the years, the American Psychological Association (APA) has devoted considerable lobbying resources to maintaining Congressional funding for CIFA. Now that CIFA has been folded into DCHC in the Defense Intelligence Agency, the APA is lobbying Congress for money for “behavioral science” to support the DIA’s military intelligence activities. Here is a section from their written testimony to the US Senate Committee on Appropriations Subcommittee on Defense regarding appropriations  for the Fiscal Year 2010 budget:

APA… is concerned with maintaining invaluable human-centered research programs formerly within DoD’s Counterintelligence Field Activity (CIFA) now that staff and programming have been transferred to the Defense Intelligence Agency.  Within this DIA program, psychologists lead intramural and extramural research programs on counterintelligence issues ranging from models of “insider threat” to cybersecurity and detection of deception.  These psychologists also consult with the three military services to translate findings from behavioral research directly into enhanced counterintelligence operations on the ground.

APA urges the Subcommittee to provide ongoing funding in FY10 for counterintelligence behavioral science research programs at DIA in light of their direct support for military intelligence operations.

APA support for CIFA and DIA is at least partly because the DCHC employs many psychologists. The APA apparently never cared what it was that these psychologists might be doing. Thus, we shouldn’t hold our breathe expecting the APA to change its position on DIA/DCHC funding now that the defense department admits that DCHC runs a detention facility using techniques like sleep deprivation that the APA itself has proclaimed unethical and amounting to either torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. After all, to the APA leadership, professional opportunities for psychology always trump professional ethics, at least in the national security sector.

May 14th, 2010

Support student strike in Puerto Rico; prevent official violence

Students at a campus of the University of Puerto Rico have been on strike against budget cuts for 23 days. A student assembly called by the administration  just voted overwhelmingly to extend the strike indefinitely, the Puerto Rico Daily Sun reports.

[Note: recent communications from colleagues in Puerto Rico raise concerns that the police may be massing before an attack on the striking students. Solidarity statements and other support from around the world is urgently needed.]

UPR students ratify indefinite strike vote

An overwhelming majority of University of Puerto Rico Río Piedras campus students ratified in a general assembly Thursday the indefinite strike vote that has kept the state-run academic institution shut for 23 consecutive days.

The assembly, which had been endorsed by UPR President José R. De la Torre, Río Piedras campus Chancellor Ana R. Guadalupe and Board of Trustees president Ygrí Rivera, was initially questioned by the striking students who considered it a “desperate attempt” by university administrators to coerce the students into lifting the strike without considering their demands.

“They tried to ambush us. Today we went to their assembly, at a place of their choosing, in their own terms, and we won. This clearly demonstrates our strength,” Student Negotiating Committee member Giovanni Roberto said.

“They should negotiate. They should stop being so intransigent,” added the student leader.

The student assembly took place at the Puerto Rico Convention Center, which was leased for the event by the UPR administration, which also provided transportation and security for the event. The efforts of the administration to influence the students went as far as buying advertising space in local newspapers accusing Negotiating Committee members of “breaking their word” by refusing to take the “understandings” they have reached to the consideration of a student assembly.

De la Torre had denied on Wednesday his actions were an attempt to influence or intimidate the students, but an effort to provide the students with all the information needed before they took a decision.

“Attorney Villaronga [Board of Trustees legal counsel] dared us to take the agreements to the students’ assembly. We did and the students were not satisfied with them. Now the ball is in their court [the trustees],” said Student General Council President Gabriel Laborde.

After the ratifying vote, favoring the indefinite strike, De la Torre issued a written statement in which he stated chancellor Guadalupe, the Board of Trustees and he would meet “to ponder the possibilities and take decisions.”

The statement also included a reaction from Guadalupe to the student vote. Both UPR officials concurred in questioning “the democratic principles” underlying the assembly they had not only endorsed the day before but also paid for and called, “an opportunity to end the strike.”

The assembly

Early morning Thursday, students began to arrive at the Convention Center and line up in front of the tables, identified by academic department, in the parking lot on the west side of the facility. Some had carpooled with friends or with their parents, who were not allowed in the center, using public transportation or in buses provided by the university administration. There was at least one bus from the Toa Alta municipal government transporting students to the assembly.

While waiting to check in, students chanted slogans, sang and danced plenas, or traditional Puerto Rican songs, and greeted each other as they met with friends and fellow classmates, undaunted by a downpour that soaked everything around 8:30 a.m.

Student athletes and the UPR cheerleading team displayed their talents by performing their award winning routines and stunts for the cheering crowd.

At 11:30 a.m., almost two and a half hours after the scheduled time the assembly was opened with 2,886 students present, almost twice the minimum required for quorum.

After some discussions the Student Negotiating Committee presented a detailed report on the negotiations with the Board of Trustees and its recommendations. The committee, including the individual departments’ action committee representatives, unanimously recommended the ratification of the strike vote.

The students’ main demands are the repealing of Certification 98, which limits and in some cases eliminates tuition waivers for students, guarantees that there will be no tuition increases and no privatization of services and / or campuses, and that their alternatives for budget cutbacks will be implemented.

A motion was immediately presented to allow for a period of questions directly to the Negotiating Committee members from the floor. After almost 30 minutes of Q&A a motion for the ratification of the strike vote was introduced.

Student Carlos Collazo argued against the motion questioning whether the strike had already served its purpose. He called for continuing negotiations, but with campus gates open and taking classes.

“The time has come to decide whether the strike has served its purpose already. Let’s study and at the same time continue fighting for our benefits,” said Collazo, who tried to introduce an amendment to the motion, but was declared out of order because the debate had already begun.

Some tension developed when, just before the motion was to be voted on, a new motion requesting a secret ballot was made. The motion was overwhelmingly defeated.

A visible majority of the students voting in favor of continuing the strike was confirmed after approximately 100 hands went up against the strike. Immediately, students started cheering and jumping into each others arms in celebration of the “victory over the university administration.”

Possible consequences

Should the fiscal health of the UPR be compromised by an insufficient budget and with an indefinitely continuing strike, Puerto Rico’s only public university could be at risk of losing its licensing as an institution of higher education.

The Daily Sun received a copy of a letter sent by Puerto Rico Higher Education Council president José Aparicio Maldonado to De la Torre where he notes that recent press reports point out that the university, and particularly the Río Piedras campus, has been involved in situations that could have caused a breach in some the regulations governing the institution’s operating license.

Aparicio Maldonado also notes in his letter that the UPR’s financial situation and proposed budget cutbacks could also affect the institution’s ability to continue offering its academic programs and thus its licensing.

The council president further advises De la Torre that recent reductions in the teaching staff and other personnel could also affect the institution’s operations.

“… therefore it is of particular importance for the university to act promptly to resolve this situation,” the document states.

May 14th, 2010