Newsweek is reporting that Wikileaks has extensive additional materials on the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq and state Department diplomatic cables. One report says that Wikileaks has a cache of Iraq intelligence documents more than three times as large as the Afghan materials released this past weekend.
July 28th, 2010
As Stewart shows, much of the media’s reaction was traditionally silly. This exempts the three sources which spent weeks going through the materials, of course.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Best Leak Ever | ||||
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July 28th, 2010
One of the highlights of the recent Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) conference was the keynote address by Nathaniel Raymond of Physicians for Human Rights entitled Making the Link: The Inside Story of How Health Professionals Designed the U.S. Regime of Torture. Thanks to Roy Eidelson, PsySR’s Past President, the talk is now available on Youtube in five parts:
Part One:
Part Two:
Part Three:
Part Four:
Part Five:
July 27th, 2010
Yesterday Wikileaks released about 75,000 raw intelligence reports from the US mission in Afghanistan.Wikileaks had provided early access to the documents to the New York Times, the Guardian, and Der Spiegel.
With this release Wikileaks has again demonstrated their vital importance in combating government and other organization’s lies and corruption. As the US government condemns them, we should support their fight for freedom of the the information vital for a functioning democracy. They, along with whoever leaked these documents, are among the heroes of our time.
Here is the announcement from the web site Wikileaks specially designed for this release:
Sunday, July 26 5pm EST.
WikiLeaks today released over 75,000 secret US military reports covering the war in Afghanistan.The Afghan War Diary an extraordinary secret compendium of over 91,000 reports covering the war in Afghanistan from 2004 to 2010. The reports describe the majority of lethal military actions involving the United States military. They include the number of persons internally stated to be killed, wounded, or detained during each action, together with the precise geographical location of each event, and the military units involved and major weapon systems used.
The Afghan War Diary is the most significant archive about the reality of war to have ever been released during the course of a war. The deaths of tens of thousands is normally only a statistic but the archive reveals the locations and the key events behind each most of these deaths. We hope its release will lead to a comprehensive understanding of the war in Afghanistan and provide the raw ingredients necessary to change its course.
Most entries have been written by soldiers and intelligence officers listening to reports radioed in from front line deployments. However the reports also contain related information from Marines intelligence, US Embassies, and reports about corruption and development activity across Afghanistan.
Each report consists of the time and precise geographic location of an event that the US Army considers significant. It includes several additional standardized fields: The broad type of the event (combat, non-combat, propaganda, etc.); the category of the event as classified by US Forces, how many were detained, wounded, and killed from civilian, allied, host nation, and enemy forces; the name of the reporting unit and a number of other fields, the most significant of which is the summary – an English language description of the events that are covered in the report.
The Diary is available on the web and can be viewed in chronological order and by by over 100 categories assigned by the US Forces such as: “escalation of force”, “friendly-fire”, “development meeting”, etc. The reports can also be viewed by our “severity” measure-the total number of people killed, injured or detained. All incidents have been placed onto a map of Afghanistan and can be viewed on Google Earth limited to a particular window of time or place. In this way the unfolding of the last six years of war may be seen.
The material shows that cover-ups start on the ground. When reporting their own activities US Units are inclined to classify civilian kills as insurgent kills, downplay the number of people killed or otherwise make excuses for themselves. The reports, when made about other US Military units are more likely to be truthful, but still down play criticism. Conversely, when reporting on the actions of non-US ISAF forces the reports tend to be frank or critical and when reporting on the Taliban or other rebel groups, bad behavior is described in comprehensive detail. The behavior of the Afghan Army and Afghan authorities are also frequently described.
The reports come from US Army with the exception most Special Forces activities. The reports do not generally cover top-secret operations or European and other ISAF Forces operations. However when a combined operation involving regular Army units occurs, details of Army partners are often revealed. For example a number of bloody operations carried out by Task Force 373, a secret US Special Forces assassination unit, are exposed in the Diary — including a raid that lead to the death of seven children.
This archive shows the vast range of small tragedies that are almost never reported by the press but which account for the overwhelming majority of deaths and injuries.
We have delayed the release of some 15,000 reports from total archive as part of a harm minimization process demanded by our source. After further review, these reports will be released, with occasional redactions, and eventually, in full, as the security situation in Afghanistan permits.
Additional information from our media partners:
- Der Spiegel: http://www.spiegel.de/international/world/0,1518,708314,00.html
- The Guardian: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/afghanistan-the-war-logs
- The New York Times: http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/world/war-logs.html
Afghan War Diary – Reading guide
The Afghan War Diary (AWD for short) consists of messages from several important US military communications systems. The messaging systems have changed over time; as such reporting standards and message format have changed as well. This reading guide tries to provide some helpful hints on interpretation and understanding of the messages contained in the AWD.Most of the messages follow a pre-set structure that is designed to make automated processing of the contents easier. It is best to think of the messages in the terms of an overall collective logbook of the Afghan war. The AWD contains the relevant events, occurrences and intelligence experiences of the military, shared among many recipients. The basic idea is that all the messages taken together should provide a full picture of a days important events, intelligence, warnings, and other statistics. Each unit, outpost, convoy, or other military action generates report about relevant daily events. The range of topics is rather wide: Improvised Explosives Devices encountered, offensive operations, taking enemy fire, engagement with possible hostile forces, talking with village elders, numbers of wounded, dead, and detained, kidnappings, broader intelligence information and explicit threat warnings from intercepted radio communications, local informers or the afghan police. It also includes day to day complaints about lack of equipment and supplies.
The description of events in the messages is often rather short and terse. To grasp the reporting style, it is helpful to understand the conditions under which the messages are composed and sent. Often they come from field units who have been under fire or under other stressful conditions all day and see the report-writing as nasty paperwork, that needs to be completed with little apparent benefit to expect. So the reporting is kept to the necessary minimum, with as little type-work as possible. The field units also need to expect questions from higher up or disciplinary measures for events recorded in the messages, so they will tend to gloss over violations of rules of engagement and other problematic behavior; the reports are often detailed when discussing actions or interactions by enemy forces. Once it is in the AWD messages, it is officially part of the record – it is subject to analysis and scrutiny. The truthfulness and completeness especially of descriptions of events must always be carefully considered. Circumstances that completely change the meaning of an reported event may have been omitted.
The reports need to answer the critical questions: Who, When, Where, What, With whom, by what Means and Why. The AWD messages are not addressed to individuals but to groups of recipients that are fulfilling certain functions, such as duty officers in a certain region. The systems where the messages originate perform distribution based on criteria like region, classification level and other information. The goal of distribution is to provide those with access and the need to know, all of the information that relevant to their duties. In practice, this seems to be working imperfectly. The messages contain geo-location information in the forms of latitude-longitude, military grid coordinates and region.
The messages contain a large number of abbreviations that are essential to understanding its contents. When browsing through the messages, underlined abbreviations pop up an little explanation, when the mouse is hovering over it. The meanings and use of some shorthands have changed over time, others are sometimes ambiguous or have several meanings that are used depending on context, region or reporting unit. If you discover the meaning of a so far unresolved acronym or abbreviations, or if you have corrections, please submit them to wl-office@sunshinepress.org.
An especially helpful reference to names of military units and task-forces and their respective responsibilities can be found at http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/ops/enduring-freedom.htm
The site also contains a list of bases, airfields http://www.globalsecurity.org/military/facility/afghanistan.htm Location names are also often shortened to three-character acronyms.
Messages may contain date and time information. Dates are mostly presented in either US numeric form (Year-Month-Day, e.g. 2009-09-04) or various Euro-style shorthands (Day-Month-Year, e.g. 2 Jan 04 or 02-Jan-04 or 2jan04 etc.).
Times are frequently noted with a time-zone identifier behind the time, e.g. “09:32Z”. Most common are Z (Zulu Time, aka. UTC time zone), D (Delta Time, aka. UTC + 4 hours) and B (Bravo Time, aka UTC + 2 hours). A full list off time zones can be found here: http://www.timeanddate.com/library/abbreviations/timezones/military/
Other times are noted without any time zone identifier at all. The Afghanistan time zone is AFT (UTC + 4:30), which may complicate things further if you are looking up messages based on local time.
Finding messages relating to known events may be complicated by date and time zone shifting; if the event is in the night or early morning, it may cause a report to appear to be be misfiled. It is advisable to always look through messages before and on the proceeding day for any event.
David Leigh, the Guardian’s investigations editor, explains the online tools they have created to help you understand the secret US military files on the war in Afghanistan: http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/datablog/video/2010/jul/25/afghanistan-war-logs-video-tutorial
Understanding the structure of the report
- The message starts with a unique ReportKey; it may be used to find messages and also to reference them.
- The next field is DateOccurred; this provides the date and time of the event or message. See Time and Date formats for details on the used formats.
- Type contains typically a broad classification of the type of event, like Friendly Action, Enemy Action, Non-Combat Event. It can be used to filter for messages of a certain type.
- Category further describes what kind of event the message is about. There are a lot of categories, from propaganda, weapons cache finds to various types of combat activities.
- TrackingNumber Is an internal tracking number.
- Title contains the title of the message.
- Summary is the actual description of the event. Usually it contains the bulk of the message content.
- Region contains the broader region of the event.
- AttackOn contains the information who was attacked during an event.
- ComplexAttack is a flag that signifies that an attack was a larger operation that required more planning, coordination and preparation. This is used as a quick filter criterion to detect events that were out of the ordinary in terms of enemy capabilities.
- ReportingUnit, UnitName, TypeOfUnit contains the information on the military unit that authored the report.
- Wounded and death are listed as numeric values, sorted by affiliation. WIA is the abbreviation for Wounded In Action. KIA is the abbreviation for Killed In Action. The numbers are recorded in the fields FriendlyWIA,FriendlyKIA,HostNationWIA,HostNationKIA,CivilianWIA,CivilianKIA,EnemyWIA,EnemyKIA
- Captured enemies are numbered in the field EnemyDetained.
- The location of events are recorded in the fields MGRS (Military Grid Reference System), Latitude, Longitude.
- The next group of fields contains information on the overall military unit, like ISAF Headquarter, that a message originated from or was updated by. Updates frequently occur when an analysis group, like one that investigated an incident or looked into the makeup of an Improvised Explosive Device added its results to a message.
- OriginatorGroup, UpdatedByGroup
- CCIR Commander’s Critical Information Requirements
- If an activity that is reported is deemed “significant”, this is noted in the field Sigact. Significant activities are analyzed and evaluated by a special group in the command structure.
- Affiliation describes if the event was of friendly or enemy nature.
- DColor controls the display color of the message in the messaging system and map views. Messages relating to enemy activity have the color Red, those relating to friendly activity are colored Blue.
- Classification contains the classification level of the message, e.g. Secret
July 26th, 2010
The New York Times reviews a book on the Eitingons, a family that included Max, an early psychoanalyst, and Leonid, a Stalinist assassin who apparently organized Trotsky’s murder.Questions are raised as to whether psychoanalyst Max was himself a Stalinist agent. Very interesting.
July 24th, 2010
The “school accountability” movement, often pushed by major forces determined to demonize public schools, has scored another victory. The New York Times reports on a superb Burlington, VT principal forced out so Burlington could qualify for Obama’s stimulus money for schools.
Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.
Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.
And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.
I support real accountability for schools. But ridiculous testing requirements, along with policies that ignore the realities of schools dealing with the poor and immigrants, are causing immeasurable harm to education in this country. Meanwhile, these policies are transforming education into training for test taking, a skill singularly useless after one graduates. But the corporate and bureaucratic forces pushing current educational reform efforts view children like they view items on an assembly line: formless when they enter and ideally identical when they leave.
The complete article:
A Popular Principal, Wounded by Government’s Good Intentions
By Michael Winerip
It’s hard to find anyone here who believes that Joyce Irvine should have been removed as principal of Wheeler Elementary School.
John Mudasigana, one of many recent African refugees whose children attend the high-poverty school, says he is grateful for how Ms. Irvine and her teachers have helped his five children. “Everything is so good about the school,” he said, before taking his daughter Evangeline, 11, into the school’s dental clinic.
Ms. Irvine’s most recent job evaluation began, “Joyce has successfully completed a phenomenal year.” Jeanne Collins, Burlington’s school superintendent, calls Ms. Irvine “a leader among her colleagues” and “a very good principal.”
Beth Evans, a Wheeler teacher, said, “Joyce has done a great job,” and United States Senator Bernie Sanders noted all the enrichment programs, including summer school, that Ms. Irvine had added since becoming principal six years ago.
“She should not have been removed,” Mr. Sanders said in an interview. “I’ve walked that school with her — she seemed to know the name and life history of every child.”
Ms. Irvine wasn’t removed by anyone who had seen her work (often 80-hour weeks) at a school where 37 of 39 fifth graders were either refugees or special-ed children and where, much to Mr. Mudasigana’s delight, his daughter Evangeline learned to play the violin.
Ms. Irvine was removed because the Burlington School District wanted to qualify for up to $3 million in federal stimulus money for its dozen schools.
And under the Obama administration rules, for a district to qualify, schools with very low test scores, like Wheeler, must do one of the following: close down; be replaced by a charter (Vermont does not have charters); remove the principal and half the staff; or remove the principal and transform the school.
And since Ms. Irvine had already “worked tirelessly,” as her evaluation said, to “successfully” transform the school last fall to an arts magnet, even she understood her removal was the least disruptive option.
“Joyce Irvine versus millions,” Ms. Irvine said. “You can buy a lot of help for children with that money.”
Burlington faced the difficult choice because performance evaluations for teachers and principals based on test results, as much as on local officials’ judgment, are a hallmark of the two main competitive grant programs the Obama administration developed to spur its initiatives: the stimulus and Race to the Top.
“I was distraught,” said Ms. Irvine, 57, who was removed July 1. “I loved being principal — I put my heart and soul into that school for six years.” Still, she counts herself lucky that the superintendent moved her to an administrative job — even if it will pay considerably less.
“I didn’t want to lose her, she’s too good,” Ms. Collins said, adding that the school’s low scores were the result of a testing system that’s “totally inappropriate” for Wheeler’s children.
Justin Hamilton, a spokesman for the United States Department of Education, noted that districts don’t have to apply for the grants, that the rules are clear and that federal officials do not remove principals. But Burlington officials say that not applying in such hard times would have shortchanged students.
At the heart of things is whether the testing system under the federal No Child Left Behind Act of 2001 can fairly assess schools full of middle-class children, as well as a school like Wheeler, with a 97 percent poverty rate and large numbers of refugees, many with little previous education.
President Obama’s Blueprint for Reform says that “instead of a single snapshot, we will recognize progress and growth.” Ms. Collins says if a year’s progress for each student were the standard, Wheeler would score well. However, the reality is that measuring every student’s yearly growth statewide is complex, and virtually all states, including Vermont, rely on a school’s annual test scores.
Under No Child rules, a student arriving one day before the state math test must take it. Burlington is a major resettlement area, and one recent September, 28 new students — from Somalia, Ethiopia, Kenya, Sudan — arrived at Wheeler and took the math test in October.
Ms. Irvine said that in a room she monitored, 15 of 18 randomly filled in test bubbles. The math tests are word problems. A sample fourth-grade question: “Use Xs to draw an array for the sum of 4+4+4.” Five percent of Wheeler’s refugee students scored proficient in math.
About half the 230 students are foreign-born, collectively speaking 30 languages. Many have been traumatized; a third see one of the school’s three caseworkers. During Ms. Irvine’s tenure, suspensions were reduced to 7 last year, from 100.
Students take the reading test after one year in the country. Ms. Irvine tells a story about Mr. Mudasigana’s son Oscar and the fifth-grade test.
Oscar needed 20 minutes to read a passage on Neil Armstrong landing his Eagle spacecraft on the moon; it should have taken 5 minutes, she said, but Oscar was determined, reading out loud to himself.
The first question asked whether the passage was fact or fiction. “He said, ‘Oh, Mrs. Irvine, man don’t go on the moon, man don’t go on the back of eagles, this is not true,’ ” she recalled. “So he got the five follow-up questions wrong — penalized for a lack of experience.”
Thirteen percent of foreign-born students, 4 percent of special-ed students and 23 percent of the entire school scored proficient in reading.
Before Mr. Obama became president, Burlington officials began working to transform Wheeler to an arts magnet, in hopes of improving socioeconomic integration.
While doing her regular job, Ms. Irvine also developed a new arts curriculum. She got a grant for a staff trip to the Kennedy Center in Washington for arts training. She rented vans so teachers could visit arts magnets in nearby states. She created partnerships with local theater groups and artists. In English class, to learn characterization, children now write a one-person play and perform it at Burlington’s Very Merry Theater.
A sign of her effectiveness: an influx of new students, so that half the early grades will consist of middle-class pupils this fall.
Ms. Irvine predicts that in two years, when these new “magnet” students are old enough to take the state tests, scores will jump, not because the school is necessarily better, but because the tests are geared to the middle class.
Senator Sanders said that while the staff should be lauded for working at one of Vermont’s most challenging schools, it has been stigmatized.
“I applaud the Obama people for paying attention to low-income kids and caring,” said Mr. Sanders, a leftist independent. “But to label the school as failing and humiliate the principal and teachers is grossly unfair.”
The district has replaced Ms. Irvine with an interim principal and will conduct a search for a replacement.
And Ms. Irvine, who hoped to finish her career on the front lines, working with children, will be Burlington’s new school improvement administrator.
“Her students made so much progress,” Ms. Collins said. “What’s happened to her is not at all connected to reality.”
July 20th, 2010
Another apparent homicide by tasering, this time by jail guards who gave high fives after the tasering.
But deputies at the new Denver jail told him to stop. When Booker, who was being processed on a charge of possession of drug paraphernalia, didn’t obey, he was held down, hit with electric shocks and then placed facedown in a holding cell, according to two inmates who watched it unfold.
Booker never got up. He was pronounced dead later that morning.
When will they say that too many people have died?
July 19th, 2010
Johann Hari reviews Noam Chomsky’s latest book:
The Enduring Truth-Telling of Noam Chomsky
By Johann Hari
Noam Chomsky is one of the most hysterically abused figures in the world today. Even his critics have to concede that his work inventing the field of linguistics — and so beginning to decode the structure of how language is formed in the human brain — makes him one of the most important intellectuals alive. But when he applies the same rigorous scientific method to figuring out the structure of how power — especially the American government’s – works, he is pepper-sprayed with smears. He is a self-hating Holocaust denier, a jihad-loving traitor, a Pol Pot-licking communist, and on and on.
If all you know of his work is the smears, then his new book Hopes and Prospects will be a revelation. In his rather dry understated way, he excavates the reality behind the babbling Babel of 24/7 corporate news, and places long-buried truths on the table for us to examine. Every one is sourced to the leading academic journals, the best experts, the sharpest medical advice — yet each one is a shock if you rely on news brought to you by corporations and corrupt right-wing billionaires.
So, for example, he uncovers the story of why Haiti is so poor, and could be shaken to pieces by an earthquake that would have killed only a handful in California. It’s a story of man-made earthquakes, one after another. The country was the first to rebel against slavery and to successful cast off the whip-hand — and so it was brutally punished by the French Empire. Every time it has begun to rise onto its feet, it has been kicked back down, with the American Empire taking over to topple its elected leaders (the last was put on a plane at gunpoint in 2008) and stifle any moves towards development.
But who knows? Who has heard about it? Who ties to hold our leaders accountable for it? Chomsky is trying to rescue crimes from the memory-hole, so we can remember them. He explains that Ronald Reagan — the great hero of the American right — was a great champion of jihadism. It was Reagan who encouraged Pakistan to simultaneously become viciously fundamentalist, and acquire nuclear weapons. Chomsky coolly condemns “the global jihad launched by Zia and Reagan,” launched for geopolitical reasons, with no concern for the after-effects.
But Reagan remains unstained. Chomsky quotes the great American historian Francis Jennings, who noted of early twentieth century leaders: “In history, the man in the ruffled shirt and gold-coated waistcoat levitates above the blood he has ordered to be spilled by dirty-handed underlings.” Instead, Chomsky says, history is too often ruled by the maxim spelled out by Thucydidies: “The strong do as they wish, while the poor suffer as they must.”
But it doesn’t have to be this way. This is a book weaved through with hope and awe at all the people who have managed to slip beyond imperial control and establish real democracy. Chomsky’s strongest model — and the world’s — is Bolivia’s experiment with radical democracy. After thirty years of having neoliberalism forced on them by the West, including the cost of water being pushed beyond their grasp, the Bolivian people rose up and elected the first indigenous leader since the European conquests. Since then, it has had the fastest fall in poverty and the most rapid growth in Latin America.
In his cool blizzard of facts and academic sources, the hot air of his critics seems to melt away. To pluck one example, the leftist-turned-neoconservative journalist Nick Cohen has accused Chomsky of being soft on jihadism (as well as of “not being bothered” by “the crimes of Adolf Hitler”). Yet Chomsky points out that an analysis of official data for the government-supported RAND corporation found that the invasion of Iraq caused a “seven-fold increase in jihadism.” If you really hate jihadism, you have to figure out what actually reduces it, rather than engage in bluster. Chomsky supported the path that produces fewer jihadis, while Cohen supports the path that produces more.
Chomsky presents all this plainly, and with — and this is often overlooked — a sly sense of humour. Describing the growing rebellions in Afghanistan, he notes: “People have the odd characteristic of objecting to the slaughter of family members and friends.” He picks through the Wonderland of U.S. propaganda-speak for the most comical examples. To pluck just one: Kennedy courtier Hans Morgenthau said that the “reality” of U.S. foreign policy lies in its “transcendent ideals”, and when the historical record suggested the U.S. had fallen short of it, this was merely “an abuse of reality.” He sternly warned that we must not “confound the abuse of reality with reality itself.”
When I was shamefully wrong about the war in Iraq myself, it was an email exchange with Noam Chomsky — where he laid bare the best evidence about what was motivating the U.S. government — that helped me figure out where I had gone so badly wrong. Hopes and Prospects is a book that can do the same for many more people – a treasure-trove of truths that shouldn’t be left buried in our over-flowing sandpit of propaganda and lies.
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Johann Hari is a writer for the Independent. To read more of his articles, click here or here.
July 19th, 2010
David Sirota reports that Obama has appointed an insurance company executive to run healthcare reform. Appointing industry executives to run the government agencies that regulate them? That used to be so Bush! But Obama is eagerly catching up.
Sirota sums up the implications:
Clearly, this is a telling indictment of the health care law itself, strongly suggesting that it was constructed by the Obama administration — as some progressives argued — as a massive taxpayer-financed giveaway to private insurers like WellPoint. And let’s be honest: In investment terms, Fowler has been a jackpot for the health industry. The industry maximized her public policy experience for their own uses when they plucked her out of the Senate. Then, having lined her pockets, they deposited her first into a key Senate committee to write the new health care law that they will operate under, and now into the administration that will implement said law. Any bets on how much Fowler will make when WellPoint (or another health insurer) inevitably rehires her in a few years?
July 15th, 2010
Steven Reisner discusses new ethics complaints against Guantanamo intelligence psychologists on Democracy Now!
Transcript:
AMY GOODMAN: Well, we’ll move on then to our top story.
JUAN GONZALEZ: Two U.S. military psychologists are facing complaints with their state licensing boards over their actions at Guantanamo Bay. The psychologists Major John Leso and Colonel Larry James are accused of helping perpetrate the abuse and torture of prisoners in violation of standards of professional conduct. On Wednesday, Harvard Law School International Human Rights Clinic filed a complaint against Larry James in Ohio where he now serves as Dean of Wright State’s School of Professional Psychology. Meanwhile, the Center for Justice and Accountability filed a complaint against John Leso here in New York. But James and Leso played key roles in interrogations at Guantanamo. Leso served at Guantanamo from June 2002 to January 2003. He led the Behavioral Science Consultation Team involved in the interrogation and torture of Mohammed al-Qahtani. In 2003 James arrived at Guantanamo to head a group of up to five psychologists who assisted in intelligence gathering and interrogations. James would later serve in Iraq where he became the first psychologist stationed at the Abu Ghraib Prison.
AMY GOODMAN: We’re joined in New York by the psychologist Dr. Steven Reisner. He filed the complaint against Major John Leso here in New York with the assistance of the Center for Justice and Accountability. Steven Reisner is senior faculty and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program. He also teaches at New York University Medical School and Columbia University and is a founding member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. He also ran for president of the American Psychological Association. Dr. Steve Reisner, welcome to Democracy Now! Can you lay out your complaint?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, there is a lot of evidence that has been made public showing that the torture programs in the CIA and at Guantanamo, the Department of Defense, were created and overseen by health professionals, particularly psychologists. Since most of these programs were classified and most of the names are also classified, we have been focusing on the few psychologists whose names we know and whose roles have been made pretty clear. And two of them, Major John Leso and Colonel Larry James, were in charge of the behavioral science consultation teams, the advisers on interrogations and on the enhanced techniques at Guantanamo.
AMY GOODMAN: Known as BSCT teams.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Known as BSCT teams, yes. Those teams oversaw the implementation of a particular type of abusive interrogation techniques from the SERE Program and they were overseen at two different times by particular psychologists whose names we know. One is Major John Leso. He was the first BSCT psychologist, BSCT number one, at Guantanamo. He and a psychiatrist named Major Bernie created the protocols for the psychological abuse of detainees, to use psychological means to force or to coerce detainees into ostensibly revealing their information. But basically why we are bringing the cases against each of them, is that they’re using their psychological knowledge, their professional expertise, to do harm.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And how, specifically, since they were obviously in the employ of the military at the time, why are you going here in New York State to challenge their licensing by the state licensing board here in New York?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, there are two reasons. First,—neither the government nor the military has yet to hold anybody involved in the torture accountable. The government refuses to police itself, the military refuses to police itself, so there is no accountability, there is no guarantee that this would not happen again under similar circumstances. And, so, looking for a way to hold people accountable has been a difficult job.
Second, and even more important for us, health professionals are held to even higher standards than interrogators or military men and women. The health professional is held to an ethical code and the ethical code stems from the fact that people are more vulnerable to health professionals. Health professionals are privy to private information, to weaknesses, to psychological and physical compromises, and they are privy to that information because they take an oath not to abuse that information to cause harm. So when health professionals use that very information, their very knowledge to cause harm, we want to hold them to ethical responsibility and make sure that those people are held accountable and have the licenses revoked if necessary.
AMY GOODMAN: What do you exactly know that Dr. Leso did?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Dr. Leso, as I said, he was the first BSCT, but there—was no clear program to use these enhanced techniques with the with detainees yet at Guantanamo. It had been used in the CIA, but there was no clear program but there was a mandate from Washington as well as the higher-ups at Guantanamo to take the gloves off and use harsh techniques. Major Leso and the psychiatrist, Major Bernie, created a protocol to use these harsh techniques, three levels of increasingly aversive types of techniques starting with just lying to the detainee and ending with hypothermia, stress positions, sleep deprivation and all of the techniques we know as torture. So, Major Leso was responsible for creating the protocols, and then they used these protocols, first with Mohammed al-Qahtani who they interrogated for 49 days straight, 20 hours a day, using and implementing these very techniques, and Major Leso is known, because the log of that interrogation was released, to have been present certain for some, if not all, of that abusive interrogation and participated.
AMY GOODMAN: Tell us what “Time” released and the significance of that.
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Yes, well, there is a log that was kept. Very often in cases of abuse, interrogation and torture, the agency that does the abuse keeps very close logs of what they have done because they have an idea justified by, in our case, the Justice Department that there are laws that permit such things. So there was a log kept very close details of al-Qahtani’s torture and interrogation. It was leaked to “Time” magazine and published. Major Leso appears in the log as Major L and comes in and sometimes makes suggestions on how to better use the techniques.
JUAN GONZALEZ: And now with your complaint, what would be the next steps? Is there a hearing mandated or is that up to the licensing board to decide?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: It is always up to the licensing board to decide what they are going to do. Very often in the past licensing boards have tried to find some way not to look these cases, but The Center for Justice and Accountability has been extraordinarily thorough in laying out exactly which standards of New York licensing law Major Leso has violated. It is a long and detailed and quite well documented piece of work, and I do not think they have any recourse but to bring this case and to investigate.
AMY GOODMAN: In 2007, Colonel Larry James spoke at The American Psychological Association’s annual convention in San Francisco. We have been covering these controversies very closely and had gone out to cover the annual meeting of the APA. James said he had been flown in from Guantanamo to oppose an APA resolution that would have prohibited psychologists from participating in interrogations at Guantanamo and other U.S. prisons.
Colonel Larry James: “This is my second tour at GITMO, Cuba. I was also the first psychologist at Abu Ghraib. I am going to repeat what I said earlier. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die. If we remove psychologists from these facilities, people are going to get hurt. There is one other thing I want to add, we’ve had young, 27, 28, 29 year old psychologists on the battlefield right now. If you support this amendment, those young psychologists are going to feel as though we have abandoned them and they need our support right now. Thank you very much.”
AMY GOODMAN: So that was in 2007 and you heard him say, “people will die” and someone shouted, “people are dying.”
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, Colonel James was helping to disseminate the false view that psychologists in interrogations were there to keep the detainees safe. They were not there to keep the detainees safe. They were there first and foremost to use their professional expertise to break down the detainees and this whole idea of keeping them safe is really new speak for the fact that they were there to do that breaking down within the Justice Department’s legal definition of torture so that they could claim that they were keeping the detainees safe and in that way protect the interrogators. The whole idea here is a program of protection for the people doing the abusive interrogations. It had nothing to do with the protection of the detainees. And Larry James was the chief BSCT starting in January 2003. When you read the standard operating procedures for mental health, for behavior protocols for detainees, during the time that Larry James was the chief psychologist, you find institutionalized abuse and torture. Isolation for 30 days at a time with absolutely no contact. Prohibition of the International Committee of the Red Cross to see these detainees, no access even to religious articles, to the Quran, unless they cooperate with interrogations, not to mention frequent interrogations.
JUAN GONZALEZ: James is now the Dean of Wright’s State School of Professional Psychology. Where is Leso, do you know?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, it’s not known where Major Leso is. He was out of the country for a few years, as far as I know, as an attaché in an embassy, I think in Europe; but he hasn’t appeared in the United States to speak, for example, before the Senate Armed Services Committee. He hasn’t appeared to respond to these charges, so I can’t answer that question. I don’t know where he is.
AMY GOODMAN: And finally, the APA’s stance right now? The American Psychological Association stance?
DR. STEVEN REISNER: Well, I wanted thank you for the coverage you’ve given to the American Psychological Association’s inaction on this issue. The APA continues to claim, just as the Bush administration did, that it is against torture, that psychologists have this role to play for the protection of the detainees, much like Larry James has said. But in fact, the APA continues to refuse to implement even its own policies to prohibit psychologists from being present at these sites that violate international law. The APA has a policy on the books that psychologists cannot be at places that violate international law and we know that Guantanamo is still in violation of international law. We know that Bagram is in violation of international law. This is plain, nobody is denying they violate the Geneva Conventions and the APA refuses to implement its own policies because, I believe, because of their long history of working closely with the military and the influence of the military psychology and the APA. Not that they’re shouldn’t be collaboration, but there should be to be ethical standards that the APA upholds universally.
AMY GOODMAN: Well, I want to thank you for being with us, Dr. Steven Reisner, New York psychologist, senior faculty and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, teaches at both NYU and Columbia.
1 comment July 11th, 2010
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