Psyche, Science, and Society

Antisemitism in basic training

The Associated Press reports on an apparent antisemitic attack in the army, and the Army’s weak response. The article also reports on hideous antisemitic comments and actions by drill sergeants, who, apparently, were simply “reprimanded”:

Soldier punished in beating of Jewish trainee

By Russ Bynum

SAVANNAH, Ga. (AP) — An Army trainee will face nonjudicial punishment rather than criminal charges for beating a Jewish soldier so badly he was treated by a hospital, the military said Friday, in a move that keeps many details of the attack secret.

Fort Benning commanders decided not to seek a court-martial in the attack on Pvt. Michael Handman and will resolve it as a personnel matter rather than a crime.

“I’m infuriated,” Jonathan Handman, the beaten soldier’s father, said Friday. “The Army’s continuing to do what they tried to do from the beginning, which is just shovel this under the carpet. It should be treated and charged as a hate crime.”

Fort Benning spokeswoman Monica Manganaro said the Army would not release the name of the soldier responsible for the attack, the punishment he received or the results of a military police investigation because nonjudicial punishments are protected under the federal Privacy Act.

Handman, 20, of Atlanta says he was beaten by a fellow trainee Sept. 24 in a laundry room next to their barracks. He was treated at the Army hospital on Fort Benning in Columbus for a concussion and bruising to the left side of his face.

Four days before the attack, Handman was interviewed by commanders of his basic training unit about complaints he’d made in letters to his parents that he had been harassed by two drill sergeants because he’s Jewish.

The Army later acknowledged one drill sergeant had ordered Handman to remove his yarmulke, which he wore with his uniform, as he ate in a dining hall. Another drill sergeant had called him “Juden” — the German word for Jews.

Manganaro said military police concluded the attack on Handman wasn’t motivated by religious bigotry, but she would give no other details.

“There isn’t anything more that I can add,” Manganaro said. “The investigation is not public information and the results are not public information.”

Handman’s father says he believes his son’s religion was a factor in the attack because it followed too closely behind his son’s harassment complaint to be coincidental.

Mikey Weinstein, president of the Military Religious Freedom Foundation, agreed. He called the Army’s denial of a religious motive in Handman’s beating “complete garbage and an absolute cover-up.”

“Michael Handman was turned into a punching bag for the Army because of his religious faith,” said Weinstein, who has helped the Handmans pursue the case with the Army.

Army commanders have the discretion to forward investigations into violations of military law to a court-martial or to handle them administratively, as happened in Handman’s case. Manganaro said the decision to pursue nonjudicial punishment was made by Handman’s battalion commander, Lt. Col. Anthony Benitez.

While Fort Benning officials would not say what punishment Handman’s attacker received, Manganaro said the maximum allowable would be 45 days restriction where he would be unable to leave his unit buildings, 45 days of extra duty, a reduction in grade and forfeiture of pay.

Fort Benning officials transferred Handman to a new training battalion of about 900 soldiers a week ago to separate him from his attacker and the two drill sergeants, who were reprimanded for religious discrimination.

Handman began basic training Aug. 29 and soon wrote a letter to his parents in which he said, “I have just never been so discriminated against/humiliated about my religion.” He said he feared some of his fellow trainees “wanted to beat the (expletive) out of me… And the only justification they have is because I’m Jewish.”

Handman’s parents contacted U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, R-Ga., who forwarded their concerns to the Army. Four days after commanders interviewed Handman about being harassed, he was beaten.

Add comment October 11th, 2008

Fabulous new film showing on Public Television: Torturing Democracy

Starting tonight, Public Television will be viewing the new documentary Torturing Democracy, which is a new film relaying the history of U.S. torture in the war on terror. Topics cover the Yoo-Bybee legal memos, the removal of Geneva protections, torture at the CIA black sites, the  development of Guantanamo, and the torture of many of the detainees whose names we have sadly come to know.

Along the way, the film explains the CIA KUBARK interrogation manual and the role of the military’sSERE [Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape] program. The reverse-engineering of SERE techniques into U.S. torture techniques is described.

Torturing Democracy was produced by Washington Media Associates in association with the National Security Archive. It was written and produced by Sherry Jones. I was given a pre-release copy of the film and watched it the other night. I was amazed at how they managed to cover so much territory in only 90 minutes. There were one or two points at which I felt they went beyond the extant data in their conclusions, but, in general, I found it excellent. While there is certainly overlap with other films — such as Taxi to the Dark Side, Ghosts of abu Ghraib, or Standard Operating Procedure — Torturing Democracy, perhaps because it was produced later, after more information had become public,  is more comprehensive.

Sometime today, the film’s website is supposed to go live, with a streaming copy of the film and an archive of the documents referred to in it plus other materials.

If the film is not scheduled in your community, call your local public television station and ask them to show it. You can read a press release here.

Add comment October 10th, 2008

Democracy Now! APA passes referendum withdrawing psychologists from detention sites

Democracy Now! today covers passage of the American Psychological Association referendum, interviewing referendum author Dan Aalbers. You can watch or listen here. Here is the transcript:

APA Approves Measure Banning Psychologists from Interrogations

The American Psychological Association has approved a landmark measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay. We speak to Dan Aalbers, member of the dissident APA group called the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. [includes rush transcript]

Guest:

Dan Aalbers, psychologist and member of the dissident APA group called the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

JUAN GONZALEZ: The American Psychological Association has approved a landmark measure banning members from taking part in interrogations of prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Iraq, Afghanistan and all of the secret CIA black sites. Nearly 60 percent of members voted in favor of the referendum in the largest turnout for an APA vote to date.

APA officials initially suggested they would delay implementing the referendum for up to a year. But in a surprise move, APA president Alan Kazdin recently wrote President Bush to inform him of the decision.

AMY GOODMAN: The letter says: “The effect of this new policy is to prohibit psychologists from any involvement in interrogations or any other operational procedures at detention sites that are in violation of the U.S. Constitution or international law…In such unlawful detention settings, persons are deprived of basic human rights and legal protections, including the right to independent judicial review of their detention…There have been many reports, from credible sources, of torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment of detainees during your term in office. Therefore, the American Psychological Association strongly calls on you and your administration to safeguard the physical and psychological welfare and human rights of individuals incarcerated by the U.S. government in such detention centers and to investigate their treatment to ensure that the highest ethical standards are being upheld.”

The referendum was spearheaded by a dissident APA group called the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology. We’re joined right now by a member of the group who helped draft the referendum text. Dan Aalbers joins us now from Reno, Nevada.

Welcome to Democracy Now! Dan Aalbers, talk about how this referendum was finally passed. There has been this growing dissident movement within the world’s largest association of psychologists, the American Psychological Association. How did you do it?

DAN AALBERS: Well, this is really a community effort. I think that there was a lot of dissatisfaction with APA policy up until this point. And a group of us came together, Psychologists for an Ethical APA, Withhold APA Dues, and looked into the APA bylaws to find a way to bring this issue directly to the membership. And so, I joined with Brad Olson, with Ruth Fallenbaum—two other dissident psychologists—and we just used old-fashioned networking. We spread it around, and I was really amazed to see the way this spread spontaneously. We did not ask a single group to endorse this referendum, but day after day, I would open my email, and another group had come in spontaneously, because people had been working autonomously in their own groups to bring this referendum forward. And it worked.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Aalbers, I wanted to turn for a minute back a year ago to that town-hall meeting in August of 2007, when hundreds of APA members gathered to discuss the issue of prisoner interrogations. This town-hall meeting came right after the APA’s Council of Representatives voted to reject the kind of ban that APA members have just approved by the referendum. You were among the outraged APA members to speak out.

DAN AALBERS: My name is Dan Aalbers, and I am just another psychologist who thinks that the moral issue of our time has landed at our doorstep. I wanted to say just a few things. One, I think that there has not been today, or in these last number of years, enough discussion about the difference between the culture of science and the culture of an intelligence community. Scientists are committed to openness. Ultimately, what keeps us ethical is not our ethical code, is not our internal review boards, but it is that we publish our research, we present things at conferences, and ultimately, the last test on whether or not we have been ethical or not is public scrutiny. This is very different from an intelligence organization, which tends to want to control information. And there are these basic incompatibilities, I think, we have not addressed.

The second point I want to make is about this moratorium that did not pass. We have made an enormous mistake, and I think it’s—not only did we do the wrong thing morally, we did not act in our best interests. We are now standing against the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, the British Psychological Society, numerous human rights organizations, the UN, the Council of Europe, and this detention and interrogation policy is going to go down. And once it does go down, we will find that we have secured the best cabin on the Titanic. Thank you.

NANCY WECKER: Hi, my name is Nancy Wecker. I’m in private practice in San Francisco. I just want to propose a conflict that we have. It’s like we’re embedded in the military, you know, like the journalists who are embedded in the war. That’s our problem. Most of our internships are all in the military, DoD or mostly the VA. So I think we have this problem with ethics are really highfalutin—you know, it’s hard for us to imagine people being tortured, for a lot of us. And then we have our affiliation and our loyalty. So, these are in conflict, and I think people couldn’t imagine, you know, withdrawing from our responsibilities and our teamwork with these people in the military, because of some highfalutin kind of ideals.

AMY GOODMAN: Dissenting psychologists, over a year ago, after the referendum, which wasn’t a referendum then—resolution, was voted down to prohibit psychologists participation in these interrogations. Actually, at that time, the APA leadership tried to throw Democracy Now! out of the open town-hall meeting, saying they didn’t want us to record anymore, but the psychologists fought back, and we were able to film, which is why we’re able to bring this to you.

Dan Aalbers, now the new president of the American Psychological Association has, to your surprise, said this will be instituted now.

DAN AALBERS: And I think that’s a very significant change in policy, that now we have an opportunity to change course. You know, as I said a year ago, that this ship is going to go down. And I really think that psychology has an opportunity to become part of the cleanup crew to stop the abuses. When we have been participating, we have been collaborating, we have been helping Guantanamo stay afloat. Now that this detention and interrogation program is going down, we now have an opportunity to be on the right side of this issue. It’s what the members want. I think you heard it in that tape of the hall. That is the voice of the membership. We have close to 60 percent of members voting for this. And I’m really happy to see that President Kazdin understands that a good leader is led from below.

JUAN GONZALEZ: And, Dan Aalbers, what’s the practical effect of the ban now? Do members have to automatically stop, or is this an individual decision on their part still? And how will it actually work out in practice?

DAN AALBERS: That’s something that remains to be seen. Again, we’re very inspired by this letter. We hope that the APA is going to go forward with a full implementation. And full implementation means putting psychologists on the side of the detainees and not the detainers. And that will mean removing psychologists from these places that operate outside of and in violation of US and international law. And so, practically, it means psychologists out as soon as possible.

AMY GOODMAN: You know, it’s interesting. This has not gotten a tremendous amount of attention outside the APA. Ironically, the New York Times had quite a significant piece on this, but it was the day they made an error, and they printed one page of the New York Times on two separate pages, and that second page covered up the article about this APA dissident victory. And they had a little correction in the New York Times that said go to our website if you want to see that article. They had that days later.

This is—this vote is the largest vote on any referendum in APA history. How did you figure out—after the resolution was voted down, after you saw the leadership was adamantly against what you were doing, how did you figure out this approach, to go with a referendum that would come from the grassroots up?

DAN AALBERS: A psychologist by the name of Dan Denuit [phon.] at the University of Oregon suggested this. And I just took his suggestion to use as part of the association bylaws, which had never been used before. I contacted the recording secretary. And it really—it really snowballed from there. So, the APA said—allowed us to use an electronic petition, and from there, it was really grassroots organization. So it started with Dan Denuit [phon.], and he got the ball rolling, and we took it from there.

AMY GOODMAN: And finally, how does it work? I mean, this is not exactly like a law passed by Congress. So, you pass this referendum. The president says it will be adopted immediately, of the American Psychological Association. He sends a letter to Gates and to President Bush. What does it mean for a member of the American Psychological Association now, if they’re at Guantanamo?

DAN AALBERS: Well, one thing, I think, that the APA, if it wants to show that it really understands this to be the primary issue of the day, that this is the—this is the moral issue of our time, is going to see that the White House, the CIA, the Department of Defense, complies with APA policy and brings these psychologists out and brings independent psychologists in. We want to have independent psychologists working inside of Guantanamo and the black sites to repair the damage. We know that Guantanamo, the black sites are systems that are designed to break a person down. We also know that psychologists can do something to repair the damage. And this referendum gets the psychologists that are working for the detainers out, and we want to ensure that the APA fights to get psychologists who are working for the detainees in, to offer them therapy, to record what has been done, and we want a full and transparent process. And we’re waiting to see what the APA will do to fully implement this.

AMY GOODMAN: Dan Aalbers, I want to thank you for being with us, member of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, dissident APA group. He co-authored the APA referendum banning involvement in prisoner interrogations that has just won in the largest vote in APA history for such a referendum. This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, the War and Peace Report. We’ll link to your website on our website at democracynow.org.

Add comment October 10th, 2008

A cartoon is worth 1,000 essays

Today’s Modern World. A Must read. And Doonesbury tackles 24 and torture.

Add comment October 6th, 2008

Mavick? Nah, he’s a branded Republican!

The New York Times explains the origins of the term “Maverick.” Suffice it to say, John McCain and Sarah Palin are the exact opposite:

Who You Callin’ a Maverick?

By John Schwartz

There’s that word again: maverick. In Thursday’s vice-presidential debate, Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska, the Republican candidate, used it to describe herself and her running mate, Senator John McCain, no fewer than six times, at one point calling him “the consummate maverick.”

But to those who know the history of the word, applying it to Mr. McCain is a bit of a stretch — and to one Texas family in particular it is even a bit offensive.

“I’m just enraged that McCain calls himself a maverick,” said Terrellita Maverick, 82, a San Antonio native who proudly carries the name of a family that has been known for its progressive politics since the 1600s, when an early ancestor in Boston got into trouble with the law over his agitation for the rights of indentured servants.

In the 1800s, Samuel Augustus Maverick went to Texas and became known for not branding his cattle. He was more interested in keeping track of the land he owned than the livestock on it, Ms. Maverick said; unbranded cattle, then, were called “Maverick’s.” The name came to mean anyone who didn’t bear another’s brand.

Sam Maverick’s grandson, Fontaine Maury Maverick, was a two-term congressman and a mayor of San Antonio who lost his mayoral re-election bid when conservatives labeled him a Communist. He served in the Roosevelt administration on the Smaller War Plants Corporation and is best known for another coinage. He came up with the term “gobbledygook” in frustration at the convoluted language of bureaucrats.

This Maverick’s son, Maury Jr., was a firebrand civil libertarian and lawyer who defended draft resisters, atheists and others scorned by society. He served in the Texas Legislature during the McCarthy era and wrote fiery columns for The San Antonio Express-News. His final column, published on Feb. 2, 2003, just after he died at 82, was an attack on the coming war in Iraq.

Terrellita Maverick, sister of Maury Jr., is a member emeritus of the board of the San Antonio chapter of the American Civil Liberties Union of Texas.

Considering the family’s long history of association with liberalism and progressive ideals, it should come as no surprise that Ms. Maverick insists that John McCain, who has voted so often with his party, “is in no way a maverick, in uppercase or lowercase.”

“It’s just incredible — the nerve! — to suggest that he’s not part of that Republican herd. Every time we hear it, all my children and I and all my family shrink a little and say, ‘Oh, my God, he said it again.’ ”

“He’s a Republican,” she said. “He’s branded.”

Add comment October 5th, 2008

Music: Astrud Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz — Corcovado [Quiet Nights of Quiet Stars]

Astrud Gilberto, Antonio Carlos Jobim, Joao Gilberto and Stan Getz

1 comment October 5th, 2008

APA and torture identified as one of most ignored stories of the year

Every year the 25 most ignored stories are identified. thi year, the APA position on torture [now being changed through member pressure] is #10 on the list:

10. APA Helps CIA Torture

Psychologists have been assisting the CIA and the U.S. military with interrogation and torture of Guantanamo detainees—which the American Psychological Association has said is fine—in spite of objections from many of its 148,000 members.

A 10-member APA task force convened on the divisive issue in July 2005 and found that assistance from psychologists was making the interrogations safe and they deferred to American standards on torture over international human-rights definitions.

The group was criticized by APA members for deliberating in secret, and later it was revealed that six of the 10 had ties to the armed services. Not only that, but as Katherine Eban reported in Vanity Fair, “Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA.”

In particular, psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen, neither of whom are APA members, honed a classified military training program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape), which teaches soldiers how to tough out torture if captured by enemies. “Mitchell and Jessen reverse-engineered the tactics inflicted on SERE trainees for use on detainees in the global war on terror,” wrote Eban.

And, as Mark Benjamin noted in a Salon.com article, employing SERE training—which is designed to replicate torture tactics that don’t abide by Geneva Conventions standards—refutes past administration assertions that current CIA torture techniques are safe and legal. “Soldiers undergoing SERE training are subject to forced nudity, stress positions, lengthy isolation, sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exhaustion from exercise and the use of water to create a sensation of suffocation,” Benjamin wrote.

Eban’s story outlined how SERE tactics were spun as “science,” despite a void of data and many criticisms that building rapport works better than blows to the head. Specifically, it’s been misreported that CIA torture techniques got al-Qaeda operative Abu Zubaydah to talk, when it was actually FBI rapport-building. In spite of this, the SERE techniques became standards in interrogation manuals that eventually made their way to U.S. officers guarding Abu Ghraib.

Ongoing uproar within the APA resulted in a petition to make an official policy limiting psychologist involvement in interrogations. On Sept. 17, a majority of 15,000 voting members approved a resolution stating that psychologists may not work in settings where “persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the U.S. Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.”

Sources: “The CIA’s Torture Teachers,” Mark Benjamin, Salon.com, June 21, 2007; “Rorschach and Awe,” Katherine Eban, Vanity Fair, July 17, 2007.

Add comment October 2nd, 2008

Discussion of Jane Mayer’s the Dark Side

At Talking Points Memo, the TPMCafe is featuring a discussion of Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side. In addition to Mayer, participants include Scott Horton, Spencer Ackerman, Marty Lederman, Christopher Hitchens, ad many others. Here is Jane’s foirst contribution:

The Unmentionable Question

By Jane Mayer

Welcome to all who are part of this discussion - please let it rip.

I wanted to start by bringing up the unmentionable question in the current presidential campaign, where both candidates are avowedly against the Bush Administration’s embrace of torture and lesser cruelties in the “war-on-terror.” While both McCain and Obama have spoken out against torture, neither has spelled out what he plans to do about holding Bush Administration officials accountable who may have committed or authorized crimes. Understandably, this is a toxic subject, reeking of political payback. But I have personally interviewed CIA officers who have said they refused to partake in the “enhanced interrogation” program because they feared that eventually it would lead to criminal charges. They had seen this happen before, and wanted nothing to do with it, even if it meant in some instances, leaving the CIA. The threat of prosecution clearly acted as a deterrent. My question is what happens if there is no accountability for America’s first program of state-authorized torture? Does it send a green light to torture again when the next attack takes place? Is it an invitation to other forms of lawlessness by the U.S. Government? But, if top officials of the Bush Administration who were acting in what they believed to be the best interests of the country’s security, are now prosecuted, is that just? Will the public support it? Particularly if Obama is elected, wont this become exhibit A that the Democrats are soft on terrorism, and members of the “Blame-America-First” Club?

Stewart Taylor has urged a truth commission rather than criminal prosecutions. Is this likely? Will it do any good? Or is it more likely that President Bush will simply pardon everyone who could conceivably be criminally liable in connection with this program before he leaves office, and then sweep the whole sordid episode under the rug? Why not?

So–on a morning when accountability seems to have evaporated in the financial world - I’d like to know what we do about accountability at the top of our government for authorizing the abuse- and in some cases the killing of U.S.-held prisoners, all of which were criminal until the day before 9/11. Any thoughts?
(Those who are uncertain about the connection between U.S.-policy and the abuse, and even deaths that resulted from it, should tune in tonight to HBO, which is airing for the first time, the Oscar-winning documentary on torture, Taxi to the Dark Side.)

Add comment September 29th, 2008

Music: Fela Kuti-Sorrow — Tears & Blood

Fela Kuti-Sorrow: Tears & Blood

[H/t Crooks & Liars]

Add comment September 29th, 2008

Fox News focus group on debate I

The Luntz Fox News focus group watching the debate went overwhelmingly for Obama. McCain:too angy, bumbly, stuck in the past.

Add comment September 27th, 2008