Psyche, Science, and Society

Amy Goodman at APA Town Hall meeting

Link TV has reproduced the Democracy Now! segment where Amy Goodman stood up at the American Psychological Association Town Hall meeting at the August Convention and informed meeting participants that the APA leadership was threatening to call security to evict her and her crew. The APA members present got a good look at the secretive, dishonest, and anti-democratic practices of the association’s leadership. On this occasion, democracy won:

Add comment October 17th, 2007

Noted psychologist Beth Shinn resigns from American Psychological Association

The damage to the American Psychological Association from its indefensible position supporting psychologists participating in interrogations where human rights are ignored, and its weak stand, full of loopholes, against bush’s torture regime. Right after the APA Convention in August, noted psychologist and author Mary Pipher returned an award to the APA in protest of these policies. Today, Beth Shinn, former President of two APA divisions, resigned from the APA “because the American Psychological Association continues to condone psychologists’ work in detention centers that violate international law and because of actions by APA’s leadership to discourage dissent from its policies in this matter.”

Here is her letter [also available in pdf]:

October 7, 2007

Dr. Sharon Brehm
President, American Psychological Association
Department of Psychology
1101 East 10th Street
Bloomington, IN 47405-7007

Dear Sharon and Members of the Board of Directors:

I am writing with sorrow to resign from the American Psychological Association. I do not do so lightly, because my connections to APA are deep and long. I have been a member since 1980, a fellow since 1986, and a president of two APA divisions and their associated societies, 9 (the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues) and 27 (the Society for Community Research and Action). I feel I owe you and my other colleagues an explanation, detailed below. Briefly, I am resigning because the American Psychological Association continues to condone psychologists’ work in detention centers that violate international law and because of actions by APA’s leadership to discourage dissent from its policies in this matter.

Condoning Work in Illegal Detention Centers

This summer, the APA Council voted down an amendment stating that the role of psychologists in settings in which detainees are deprived of their human rights should be limited to providing psychological treatment. APA’s action effectively condones psychologists’ continued participation in interrogations at Guantánamo and in other centers that violate both the Geneva Convention and the U.S. Constitution. The resolution that was approved simply requires that psychologists not plan, design, or assist in the use of torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment, and that they report instances of which they become aware.

I believe that the failure of APA to call for psychologists to leave Guantánamo and CIA black sites lends support and legitimacy to violations of ethics and international law. The American Bar Association has announced that it will stop attempting to find lawyers for detainees at Guantánamo because, according to a report in the New York Times, “it did not want to ‘lend support and credibility’ to what it called inadequate legal protections for the 340 men held there” (Glaberson, 2007). APA should show similar courage.

In addition, although I appreciate the argument that psychologists “on the inside” are in a position to challenge conditions of prisoners’ confinement, and have done so, I think it is equally likely that they will be co-opted. There is strong social psychological evidence of the coercive power of situational influences, even in the course of quite short-term experiments, and evidence that individuals recruit information and shift attitudes to justify the behavior in which they have engaged. Psychologists are unlikely to be immune to such forces, especially when secrecy requirements prevent them from discussing issues with others who are not subject to the same influences. Under the long-term and open-ended coercive conditions of detention centers, it seems at least as likely that psychologists would become part of the problem as that they would succeed in creating solutions. Indeed, the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC), as cited in the New York Times and denied by the government, has stated that information from detainees’ medical records has been used to guide interrogations, and that psychologists are centrally involved in this process:

Doctors and medical personnel conveyed information about prisoners’ mental health and vulnerabilities to interrogators, the report said, sometimes directly, but usually through a group called the Behavioral Science Consultation Team, or B.S.C.T. The team, known informally as Biscuit, is composed of psychologists and psychological workers who advise the interrogators, the report said. (Lewis, 2004).

Although APA has passed resolutions unequivocally condemning and prohibiting psychologists’ participation in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment, a report of the Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense (dated August 25, 2006, but released more recently) suggests that psychologists have been centrally involved in practices that the APA has banned. In a section on “development of interrogation policy at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba,” the report suggests that psychologists were responsible for reverse engineering torture techniques from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program originally intended to train U.S. personnel how to resist breaking down if they were captured and tortured. Especially chilling to me, the report states that “The Army Special Operations Command was examining the role of interrogation support as a ‘SERE Psychologist competency area’” (p. 25)

The APA’s ban on psychologists’ participation in torture is absolute, but the Association explicitly amended its Ethics Code in 2002 to permit psychologists who experience other conflicts between law and ethics to “adhere to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority” (section 1.02). They should first make the conflict known and attempt to resolve it. I believe that “the governing legal authority” at both Guantánamo and CIA black sites, where individuals are held without prospect of release, under shifting legal guidelines, and without the opportunity to challenge their detention in impartial courts, violates international law. By continuing to work in such facilities, psychologists, whatever their intentions, become complicit in their violations of human rights. Given the ICRC evidence that psychologists have misused medical records at Guantánamo to exploit detainees’ vulnerabilities in interrogation, I would not advocate an exception for therapeutic treatment.

Note that I make no representation about the guilt or innocence of the detainees. Some may well be guilty of heinous crimes against humanity. Others are probably innocents swept up in error. But all are human beings entitled to the protection of international law.

Discouraging Dissent

Reasonable people can disagree about appropriate ethical responses to conditions that are widely deemed unethical. I appreciate the debate that went on at the Convention this summer. However, in many other ways, APA’s leaders have blocked challenges to psychologists’ involvement in detention centers, misrepresented the nature of dissent, and even made ad hominem attacks on dissenters.

An early action that minimized challenges was the composition of the APA Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS). Three of the ten members were active duty military officers, two more worked for Defense Department Agencies, and a sixth consulted with a Defense agency. As noted in a September 19 letter to you by Drs. Steven Reisner, Stephen Soldz, and Brad Olson (Reisner, Soldz & Olson, 2007), as well as an earlier open letter which I co-signed, some of these members were in the chain of command at the places and during the times that abuses have been documented. Some are also credited with protesting unethical actions. Irrespective of their individual actions, their employment constituted a conflict of interest. A committee’s criticism of detention centers and psychologists’ involvement in them is likely to be muted when a majority of its members are paid salaries or consulting fees by the military or the Department of Defense. Two of the four members with no Defense involvement have now dissociated themselves from the PENS Task Force. Dr. Wessells resigned in January, 2006, “because continuing work with the Task Force tacitly legitimates the wider silence and inaction of the APA on the crucial issues at hand” (Wessells, 2006) and Dr. Arrigo publicly complained about irregularities in Task Force procedures in her remarks at the most recent APA convention, as recorded by Democracy Now (Arrigo, 2007).

Another recent action to minimize challenge occurred this summer at the APA convention, when the Board of Directors initially attempted to prevent APA Council from voting on a resolution limiting psychologists’ roles in detention centers (“the moratorium resolution”) by presenting its own substitute resolution, which reaffirmed, but also unfortunately weakened last year’s resolution condemning torture. Under APA procedures, Council would have had the opportunity to vote on a moratorium resolution only if they first voted down the substitute resolution condemning torture. When advocates pointed out that this substitution violated APA procedures (2006, p. 19: substitute motions cannot “change an affirmative main motion into a negative proposal not to take that action”) there was discussion and compromise: A stronger substitute resolution was put forward and passed, and a limit on psychologists’ involvement was allowed as an amendment, and voted down. Dr. Linda Woolf (2007) has written articulately and at length about the limitations of the resolution that was passed: “Ultimately,” she summarizes, “the 2007 Resolution maintains the status quo and prisoners will continue to experience torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment both as a function of perpetrator behavior and as a function of context” (Woolf, 2007).

An example of the misrepresentation of dissent is the letter you have circulated from Dr. Olivia Moorehead-Slaughter, chair of the PENS Task Force (Moorehead-Slaughter, 2007), commenting on Dr. Arrigo’s concerns about the Task Force. Dr. Moorehead-Slaughter spends a considerable portion of her letter defending against attacks that Dr. Arrigo never made. Someone who read only Dr. Moorehead-Slaughter’s reply but not Dr. Arrigo’s original criticism of procedural irregularities and conflicts of interest, might think the criticism was misguided. For example, Dr. Moorehead-Slaughter begins with a disclaimer that she has “never worked in any capacity for the CIA, the FBI, or the Department of Defense,” a claim that Dr. Arrigo never made, and an extensive defense of her integrity, which Dr. Arrigo never impugned. She goes on to defend the actions and integrity of other members of the Task Force, when Dr. Arrigo’s concern was with procedures and conflicts of interest created by members’ employment. Dr. Moorehead-Slaughter does go on to address some of Dr. Arrigo’s procedural concerns, although in ways that have been disputed by Reisner et al. (2007). She ends by lauding APA’s openness as represented in this summer’s mini-convention on ethics and interrogation, which I agree was laudable, and by the fact that “The Board of Directors was entirely committed to ensuring that a proposal limiting the roles of APA members in detention facilities would be discussed and debated at the Council of Representatives meeting.” As noted above, I do not believe this is true.

More egregious is former president Gerald Koocher’s denigration of critics. In his presidential column in the APA’s Monitor on Psychology, he complained that:

A number of opportunistic commentators masquerading as scholars have continued to report on alleged abuses by mental health professionals. However, when solicited in person to provide APA with names and circumstances in support of such claims, no data have been forthcoming from these same critics and no APA members have been linked to unprofessional behaviors (Koocher, 2006, p. 7, emphasis added).

The American Psychological Associations Public Affairs Office (2007), on the other hand, acknowledges that two psychologists have been identified as developers of interrogation tactics, but they are not APA members.

Dr. Koocher has also defamed both Dr. Arrigo and her father in a widely-circulated, open letter to Amy Goodman of Democracy Now! (Koocher, 2007). His allegations were refuted (Reisner, et al., 2007) and since removed from his web site and Goodman’s. But even if they had been true, his effort to discredit the messenger, rather than dealing with the substance of the message, has no place in reasoned argument. The substance of Dr. Arrigo’s message was that APA-Department of Defense conflicts of interest on the part of six task force members and several unacknowledged participants in the task force meeting compromised the PENS report.

In sum, I have become increasingly troubled with the American Psychological Associations failure to call for a moratorium on psychologists’ involvement at Guantánamo and CIA black sites, and am appalled by the actions of its leadership in response to dissent. I hereby resign.

Marybeth Shinn
Member # 1603-1653

Cc: Members of the Board of Directors, Dr. Moorehead-Slaughter

References

American Psychological Association (2006). 2006 Council of Representatives Handbook. http://www.apa.org/governance/rephandbook06.pdf

American Psychological Association (2007) Reaffirmation of the American Psychological Association Position Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment and Its Application to Individuals Defined in the United States Code as “Enemy Combatants” Resolution Adopted August 19, 2007. http://www.apa.org/governance/resolutions/councilres0807.html

American Psychological Association Public Affairs Office (September, 2007).Frequently asked questions regarding apa’s policies and positions on the use of torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment during interrogations. http://www.apa.org/releases/faqinterrogation.html

Arrigo, J.M. (2007, August 20) Remarks at the Convention of the American Psychological Association, as recorded by Democracy Now. Transcript at http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/08/20/1628234.

Glaberson, W. (2007, September 29). Legal aid offer for detainees is retracted. The New York Times, p. A9. Available here.

Koocher, G. (2006, Feb 2.). Speaking against torture. President’s Column, Monitor on Psychology, 37 (2), p. 5. Available here.

Koocher, G. (2007). Open letter to Amy Goodman. http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/wp-content/uploads/2007/09/koocher_open_letter_to_amy_goodman.pdf

Lewis, N. A. (2004, November 30). Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantánamo. The New York Times, p. A1. Available here.

Moorehead-Slaughter, O. (2007, undated in the version I received). Letter to Sharon Brehm. Posted on multiple listservs and posted here

Office of the Inspector General of the Department of Defense (August 25, 2006). Review of the DOD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse. Report No. 06-Intell-10, August 25, 2006, Evaluation Report. Available here.

Reisner, S., Soldz, S., & Olson, B. (2007, September 19). Letter to Sharon Brehm. Posted on multiple listservs and posted here

Wessells, M. (2006, January 15). Resignation letter. Posted on listserv of the Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues as well as here.

Woolf, L. M. (2007, September 1/2). Sad day for psychologists: Major blow against human rights. Counterpunch. http://www.counterpunch.org/woolf09012007.html

Meanwhile, the list of APA members protesting by withholding their dues grows daily. How many more members will have to join them, Beth Shinn, and Mary Pipher before the APA changes course and decisively breaks with the Bush administration and its torture regime? Or will the organization go the way of the dinosaurs, to be replaced by an organization willing to put ethics above access to the military/intelligence establishment?

18 comments October 7th, 2007

Burma/Myanmar: Concentration camps reported

The London Times reports that thousands of protesters are being held in a concentration camp in Rangoon. Excerpt:

According to Western diplomats and at least one Burmese government official, the technical institute has become a temporary concentration camp for 1,700 of the victims of last week’s brutal suppression of the democracy uprising. It provides a partial answer to one of the lingering questions about the Burmese junta’s crackdown: where are the monks, democracy activists and journalists who have been rounded up and spirited away over the past six weeks?

Despite the international attention given to the quashing of the anti-Government marches, the crackdown remains undocumented. Apart from admitting that 13 people have died, a figure regarded by most observers as an underestimate, the authorities have given no details of the numbers of those arrested and detained.

Most people have vanished without trace, many of them the Buddhist monks who formed the backbone of the tens of thousands of people who turned out last week in Rangoon and Mandalay. “We think that at least 30 have been killed, about 1,400 people have been arrested,” Alexander Downer, the Australian Foreign Minister said. “This is a brutal regime and we’ve seen it at work over the last few days.”

One international organisation based in Rangoon has made a provisional reckoning of 40 dead, based on reports from hospitals, 1,000 monks arrested and 3,000 secular detainees. The only thing of which one can be sure is that somewhere in the country large numbers of people are being held in an invisible prison camp, without charge, without legal recourse and without the ability to communicate.

Tomorrow, in collaboration with bloggers around the world, I will have only one post,  the Free Burma logo from http://free-burma.org/

Add comment October 3rd, 2007

Silent protest in Burma

The AP reports that citizens in Burma/Myanmar have launched a silent protest, turning off the government news. Could be a good idea for this country too:

Myanmar citizens launch silent protest
YANGON, Myanmar - A growing number of citizens in Myanmar’s largest city are shutting off the government-run nightly newscast, trying to send the subtle message to authorities that they are tired of listening to their propaganda, residents said Tuesday.

Most are switching off the news for the first 15 minutes of the hour-long broadcast, while some also are shutting off all the lights in their homes.

It was unclear how many people participated in the protest, which spread by word of mouth.

“This is the least dangerous anti-government activity that I can take,” said a resident of Yangon taking part in the protest that began Monday. “By doing this, I am showing that I am not listening to what the government is saying,” the woman said, refusing to give her name for fear of government reprisal.

With the streets cleared of protesters, the Internet down and many residents too fearful to go out, turning off the government news appears to be one of the few avenues left to express opposition to the regime.

Authorities last week cracked down on tens of thousands of protesters, gunning down at least nine demonstrators and a Japanese journalist. They also detained thousands including many monks who were spearheading the demonstrations that began Aug. 19. They slapped a curfew on Yangon and banned groups of more than five from gathering.

They have also taken to the airwaves each night around 8 p.m. local time, using the hour-long newscasts to criticize the protests as a campaign by Western governments and external dissidents to destabilize the country. They have also repeatedly shown mass, pro-government rallies to counter the impact of the demonstrations.

All electronic media and daily newspapers inside the country are controlled by the government, and privately owned magazines operate under tight censorship. There are only two news channels, both run by the government.

While the average citizen must endure the staid, government news, more prosperous ones long ago turned to Radio Free Asia or the British Broadcasting Corp. for an accurate depiction of events in the country. Others also count on the Internet, which was shut down after protesters effectively used it for weeks to publicize the growing protest and subsequent crackdown.

Add comment October 2nd, 2007

Burma/Myanmar: Splits in military reported, opposition regrouping

Asia Times has more on the crisis in Burma/Myanmar. They erport divisions in the military elite and a regrouping of the opposition movement. It remains, of course, to be seen if tjis is but wishful fantasy. But we can hope:

Cracks emerge in Myanmar military unity
By Larry Jagan

BANGKOK – Myanmar’s protests have lost steam as security forces clamp down, killing over a dozen and arresting as many as 1,000 people involved in the recent street protests that have grabbed global headlines. Now there are indications that the ruling State Peace and Development Council’s (SPDC’s) top two generals are at loggerheads over how to proceed in the aftermath of the crackdown.

SPDC second-in-command General Maung Aye reportedly opposed using force against the tens of thousands of monks who took to the streets, bringing him into conflict with Senior General Than Shwe, according to sources close to Maung Aye. Some soldiers in the old capital of Yangon and the city of Mandalay last week reportedly refused to obey their senior officers’ commands to attack or shoot at protesting monks, according to diplomatic sources in Yangon. Several aid workers in Mandalay reportedly witnessed soldiers there refusing to open fire when ordered by commanding officers.

General Than Shwe, the SPDC’s top general, personally gave the orders to the local commanders in Yangon to shoot into the crowd, a military source told Asia Times Online. “The two main commanders in Yangon have told their subordinates that the senior general directly ordered the attack last week,” he said. That shoot-to-kill policy has backfired on the junta, with international condemnation coming from the West as well as neighboring countries included in the 10-member Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN), of which Myanmar is a member.

United Nations special envoy to Myanmar Ibrahim Gambari met with detained opposition leader Aung San Suu Kyi on Sunday and is reportedly now pressing to meet with both Than Shwe and Maung Aye. So far the SPDC leadership has declined to meet with the UN envoy, perhaps, some analysts speculate, precisely because the top two generals now view the next steps in dealing with the crisis differently.

There are unconfirmed reports that Than Shwe’s wife and one of his daughters, as well as his top business associate, Tay Za, flew out of the country on a Air Bagan flight to Singapore last week and have since traveled on to Dubai in the United Arab Emirates. Their apparent flight came against the backdrop of growing questions about troop loyalty due to orders to shoot at monks and the possibility that they could have broken rank and joined with the street protestors.

“If the current crackdown results in more bloodshed, a mutiny within the 400,000-strong armed forces is a distinct possibility,” said Win Min, a Myanmar analyst based in Chiang Mai, Thailand. “Family members of the grassroots soldiers are suffering from increasing food and fuel prices like the people who are demonstrating, though top level officers are getting amazingly rich.”

Indeed, there have already been notable instances of a breakdown in the chain of command, according to diplomats. On September 20, for still unclear reasons security forces positioned at the barricades blocking access to Aung San Suu Kyi’s house allowed marching monks to pass and pray in front of the house, an episode that was widely reported worldwide. The following day, however, another group of monks bidding to pass her compound was turned away by a larger number of security personnel.

On Saturday, Maung Aye personally took control of the operations in Yangon and he reportedly posted soldiers with sub-machine guns at the entrance to University Avenue where Suu Kyi is under house arrest.

It is unclear if the apparent divergent views between the SPDC’s top two generals have resulted in a full-blown rift. But there are signs that Than Shwe fears a possible internal military power play, similar to the one in 1992 that resulted in his rise to power.

Maung Aye apparently believes the use of the civilian organization, the Union Solidarity and Development Association (USDA), to control the crowds is damaging the army’s authority and threatens even broader instability, according to a source close to his family. Plainclothes USDA members have used crude weapons and taken the lead in brutally assaulting and detaining protestors. Notably, the organization is the brainchild of Than Shwe, which he helped to establish in 1993 to create the illusion of grassroots support for the military’s civilian programs and has relied on in the past to crack down on political opposition.

Curfews and detentions

After detaining key members of the 88 Generation Student Group that started the protests on September 19, military authorities have apparently been at a loss in identifying who is leading the protests. They have recently swooped on Yangon’s Buddhist monasteries and temples, arresting hundreds of monks, in an apparent effort to locate the protest leaders and halt the demonstrations.

Key opposition figures, among them actors, artists, journalists and writers, including even the renowned comedian Zargana, have also been detained. Most of the leading members of Suu Kyi’s pro-democracy party, the National League for Democracy (NLD), have likewise been arrested in recent days.

While there is a lull in the street protests at present, with both the military and protestors apparently regrouping and reorganizing, there is little doubt that a major movement to overthrow the military regime is in the making. While the monks were the leading force in recent weeks, former and current activists and student leaders are now reportedly organizing behind the scenes.

Senior monks and students recently formed a joint “strike committee” to lead future demonstrations. “We are going for it, this is our time. We have to take this chance now as there may never be another one,” a senior former student leader recently told Asia Times Online from hiding inside the country. “The students will support the monks’ peaceful protests,” he said.

After weeks of mainly peaceful protests led by the monks, the regime finally dropped their policy of restraint last week and hit back, killing at least 13 and injuring many more. Dusk-to-dawn curfews are now in place in Yangon and Mandalay and more than 20,000 troops have been deployed in the former capital. Soldiers are stationed outside Buddhist monasteries and temples to prevent the monks from returning to the streets and they have reportedly been warned that they would be shot if they ignored the warning.

Up until a week ago the monks had been primarily protesting against the local authorities’ use of violence to quell an earlier march near Mandalay, where several monks were badly beaten by violent vigilantes wielding sticks. All along, though, the monks have also been calling on the government to reduce prices, supporting the first of the public protests that broke out more than a month ago after the government raised certain fuel charges by up to 500%.

“They know better than anyone the impact the rising fuel and food prices is having on the people at the grassroots,” said Myanmar analyst Aung Naing Oo, noting that monks rely on the donation of daily alms for their survival. “They understand that this has become harder and harder, especially over the last two years. What they used to collect from four or five houses, now takes more than 30,” he said.

But Buddhist monks are now clearly in the political vanguard, depending on which monks you listen to, alternatively for national reconciliation, dialogue between the military and the political opposition National League for Democracy, or outright regime change through popular protests. The fact that the Buddhist clergy has recently taken on such an overt political role is exceptional.

After the military first assaulted monks near Mandalay, a new group emerged known as the All Burma Monks Alliance, which represents a younger, more radical segment of the Buddhist clergy. They have since urged ordinary people “to struggle peacefully against the evil military dictatorship until it is banished from the land”.

“Normally monks are not political,” said Win Min, based at Chiang Mai University in northern Thailand. “They focus on their individual enlightenment according to traditional Buddhism. What is happening now shows that the situation has reached the point where they can no longer tolerate it.”

So far Suu Kyi’s NLD has been a bystander and her members seemingly uninvolved in organizing the spontaneous monk-led marches. But the charismatic leader is known to have strong support among the protesting monks and she would seem to be the key to any potential political settlement to the recent unrest.

Than Shwe is known to harbor a strong personal grudge against her and he would likely be unwilling to enter into any compromise that shared power with her NLD. The wildcard is whether another military faction inside the SPDC views things differently and might be willing to take the chance of trying to remove their recalcitrant leader for their own political gain.

Larry Jagan previously covered Myanmar politics for the British Broadcasting Corp. He is currently a freelance journalist based in Bangkok.

Add comment October 2nd, 2007

Scott Horton on the meaning of torture

Scott Horton has learned that torture has nothing to do with “interrogation,” with obtaining information. It has rather everything to do with asserting power. Absolute, unchallenged, uncontested power to do anything to anyone:

The Talisman of Torture

by Scott Horton

About two years ago, I was asked to give an address concerning the organized bar’s engagement on the torture issue before a gathering of bar association presidents from throughout the Western hemisphere. When it was over, a former president of the Argentine bar came up to me. “You must fight this with every ounce of energy you possess,” he said. “Because in the end, you will find that this torture is not about intelligence gathering, or ticking bombs or any other such nonsense. It is a talisman. A talisman of power. A government that can torture and do it with impunity can do anything. No law stands in its way. The very idea of the rule of law crumbles into dust. It means brutal tyranny.” At the time, I thought this was a bit crazy, but I knew what the Argentines had gone through and I respected the comment. As time progresses, I see exactly what he meant. Indeed, the experience of the bar in Argentina and Chile from the seventies and early eighties is perfectly on point for America today. First they introduced torture. And getting away with it, they have begun systematically to defy the notion that they are subject to the rule of law. We see this every day in dark figures like Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, and Dick Cheney. Torture, as my Argentine friend said, is but a talisman.

Add comment May 24th, 2007

National Review columnist talks of military coup

In his column Don’t Get Weak: Random thoughts on the passing scene, Thomas Sowell lets us know what’s on his mind: the desirability of a military coup:

When I see the worsening degeneracy in our politicians, our media, our educators, and our intelligentsia, I can’t help wondering if the day may yet come when the only thing that can save this country is a military coup.

Add comment May 3rd, 2007

More on Steven Miles’ new archive on detention center medical activities

Here is a Twin Cities, Minnesota, press report on Stephen Miles’ new archive on medical activities (including psychological) in America’s detainee prisons. [I have highlighted a phrase, pointed out by Dr. Miles, in which a DoD spokesperson demonstrates her complete lack of understanding of the basic character of democracy.]:

U archives unvarnished look at war detainees
Treatment detailed online with U.S. documents
BY JEREMY OLSON

A University of Minnesota bioethicist has created an online database of government documents that he hopes will increase public scrutiny of how the U.S. has treated detainees from Iraq and Afghanistan.

Steven Miles said the U archive is not an “anti-war site” but offers an unvarnished look at government documents with disturbing details of deaths, maltreatment and inadequate medical care.

There are records detailing:

“The idea of our government taking babies away from mothers who should be nursing so those mothers can endure interrogation is just flat-out wrong,” Miles said. “Read the account and see if it chills you. It chills me.”

Most of the documents were provided by the American Civil Liberties Union, which obtained them through Freedom of Information Act requests and a lawsuit.

The civil rights group has received the documents in large and unorganized batches that have been difficult to sort and organize in any usable way, said Jameel Jaffer, an ACLU attorney who has handled the FOIA lawsuits.

The U archive took the specific documents dealing with medical care and death investigations, and organized them by their subjects and individuals involved. Miles said some documents had names blacked out, but he was able to link them with other investigative documents that still contained the names.

“The government has never admitted that a child died in these prisons,” he said. “To find where they failed to redact a sentence which describes a child dying of untreated tuberculosis is really part of the process of accountability.”

Miles included that incident in his book “Oath Betrayed,” which was published last year on the treatment of prison detainees.

When George Annas of the Boston University School of Public Health reviewed the book, he challenged Miles to make the source documents publicly available. Now that this has happened, Annas said it is a true public service.

“Otherwise, it’s too easy for people to say, ‘Oh it’s not real. You’re making this up. The military says we’re not doing this,’ ” Annas said.

A Defense Department spokeswoman acknowledged the U documents were originally sent to the ACLU, but she declined further comment.

“Further dissemination of this material isn’t in the spirit of the FOIA program,” spokeswoman Cynthia Smith said.

The documents reflect the new demand for “real-time” information instead of a delayed disclosure of government actions 30 years later that often has “a historian’s gloss on it,” Miles said.

Miles said he was startled by how documents reviewing the same account were widely different. A Navy investigative report on the escapee concluded that his death resulted from a fall during one of several attempts.

One Marine report mentioned the fall, but it ruled the cause of death as inconclusive and described how the man was tightly restrained for more than 90 minutes before his death.

According to the Marine report: “He was restrained, and this time the guards tied him to the window with his back to the window, his arms stretched apart, with his legs tied to the bars of the window. The guards also tied a strap of engineer tape to the detainee’s midsection, to further restrain him. His position resembled that of a person who had been crucified.”

A follow-up Marine investigation determined that the restraint was improper and potentially dangerous, but that the escapee likely died from injuries sustained in the fall. The report noted the improper restraint was partly the result of miscommunication caused by the death of the company commander.

The escapee was a combatant detained during attacks in April 2004 on a camp in Iraq that killed five Marines and wounded many more, the report noted. Marines at least once would have been justified in shooting him during an escape, but didn’t, the report said.

Some people may view these detainee deaths as the natural consequence of war, but Miles said it is important for the public to make that judgment. It is important for the U.S. to provide humane care of prisoners and to abide by international anti-torture laws if it expects other countries to meet those standards, Miles said.

The U’s Human Rights Library will continue to update the database as more documents become available. Missing right now are any documents from the CIA detailing how that intelligence agency has treated detainees.

“It is important,” Miles said, “given the gravity of issues here - where war crimes are at stake - that the data be as soundly presented as possible.”

Jeremy Olson can be reached at jolson@pioneerpress.com or 651-228-5583.

Add comment April 26th, 2007

Greg Palast on attorneygate: Don’t Fire Gonzales

Greg Palast sends the following article on the Justice Department attorney purge scandal. In it he reminds us that Alberto Gonzales is simply a patsy and that the real issue isn’t the firing of the federal attorney’s, but why they were fired, namely, bogus voter suppression claims being used to steal the 2008 election. Palast calls for firing Karl Rove. However, his evidence implies that the eight replacement attorney’s, carefully selected to be willing to pursue bogus election fraud claims in the run-up to the 2008 elections, must themselves be replaced immediately. And, while we’re at it, lets fire and prosecute Gonzales for his major crime: aiding and abetting torture.

Don’t Fire Gonzales

by Greg Palast
Wednesday, April 25, 2007

Before President Bush fired his sorry ass, US Attorney David Iglesias of New Mexico, in a last sad attempt to suck up to his Republican padrones, allowed his chief mouthpiece, Norm Cairns, to speak with me. He shouldn’t have.

That was two years back, while I was investigating strange doings in New Mexico and Arizona, where, simultaneously, state legislators, Republicans all, claimed they had evidence of “voter fraud.” Psychiatrists call this kind of mutual delusional behavior folie a deux. I suspected something else: I smelled Karl Rove.

In the New Mexico legislature, a suburban Albuquerque political hackette, Justine Fox-Young (her real name), claimed to have “several” specific cases of vote identity rustling. Like Joe McCarthy waving his list of “Communists,” she waived documents of “evidence” of illegal voting on the floor of the Legislature. I called Ms. Fox-Young and asked her to send me the papers.

The “evidence” never arrived. Maybe her fax machine was broken. I called Justine.

Q. Justine, you’ve uncovered criminals! Did you turn their names over to the US Attorney?

A. Well, no, but someone did.

Whose initials are Karl Rove?

She swore to me that US Attorney Iglesias would back up her story: he was investigating the evil voters and was about to indict them.

So I got Iglesias’ guy Norm on the phone. Was Iglesias prosecuting, or actively investigating, one single real case of voter fraud?

Norm went into a lengthy swirly-whirly river of diving, ducking bullshit. I dove in.

Me: In other words, you can’t back her story?

Norm: Well, yeah, uh, I guess you’d say that’s true.

I guess I will say that, Norm. Fox-Young had just plain made it up; fibbed, lied, faked the evidence.

There was a multi-state con in operation. But what was it? Each of these bogus claims of voter fraud was attached to a sales pitch for a state law to tighten voter ID requirements — to prevent these ne’er-do-wells from voting twice. In Arizona, one crack-pot Republican legislator, the Hon. Russell Pearce, claimed he had evidence that five million Mexicans had illegally crossed the border to vote.

The point: Rove knew that a “challenge” operation by the Republican Party, run from his office, knocked out 300,000 voters — mainly poor ones, voters of color. His crew wanted to hike that higher.

The notable thing about this crime of voter identity theft is that it doesn’t happen. You are more likely to encounter ballot boxes that spontaneously combust. I found cases of voters struck by lightening — but out of 120 million votes cast, I couldn’t find a dozen criminal cases of a bandit stealing someone’s identity to vote.

Since the Republicans couldn’t find such criminals, they had to make them up. Force prosecutors to bring false charges against innocent voters (one did just that in Wisconsin) or at least claim they were hot on the trail of the fraudulent voters.

Iglesias, though a Republican, wouldn’t bring bogus charges. And he wouldn’t lie about active investigations that didn’t exist except in Rove’s imagination.

That was his mistake.

Rove’s right-hand hit-man, Tim Griffin, added Iglesias to the hit list of prosecutors who were cut down on December 7, 2006.

Griffin himself, after the December 7 firings, was appointed by Attorney General Gonzales, at Rove’s personal request, to one of the newly-vacated slots as US Attorney for Arkansas. The sleeper cell of Rove-bot US attorneys is now in place to bless voter suppression games in 2008.

I’ve previously reported for BBC that Griffin was the Man in the Memos who directed the massive, wrongful purge of African-American soldiers in 2004 — the ‘caging’ list scam. Based on that expose, voting rights lawyer Robert F. Kennedy Jr., said, “Griffin and Rove should be in jail, not in office.” That, too is another story — But the important thing to pick up here is:

1. It’s all about the 2008 election.
2. It’s not about Gonzales.

We’ve been here before. Gonzales is getting Libby’d. Takes the bullet for Karl Rove and the White House. If you wondered why the Republican jackals like the sinister Senator Specter piled on Gonzales — it’s because they were told to.

These guys learned from Richard Nixon. In 1973, when Nixon was getting hammered over Watergate, he threw the Senate Committee his Attorney General, a schmuck named Kleindeist. Famously, Nixon’s own Rove, a devious creep named John Erlichman, told Nixon to leave the Attorney General, “twisting slowly in the wind.”

Rove and Bush are doing the Nixon Twist on Gonzales.

Look, I have no sympathy for Alberto the Doomed. He’s guilty of a crime I employed in racketeering cases: “Willful failure to know.” It’s a kind of fraud; Alberto was going way out of his way to not know what he had to know, that Rove and the President were toying with prosecutors.

Gonzales is their glove-puppet. Why fire him? The nation watches these hearings and wants to kill something. But why shoot the puppet? It’s time to fire the puppeteer. Eh, Mr. Rove?

Add comment April 25th, 2007

Howard Zinn: ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’

Inveresk Street Ingrate has reproduced an old article by Howard Zinn on what he found valuable in the life and work of Karl Marx, appropriately titled ‘Je Ne Suis Pas Marxiste.’ Well worth reading.

Here’s the explanation of the title:

remembered that famous statement of Marx: “Je ne suis pas Marxiste.” I always wondered why Marx, an English-speaking German who had studied Greek for his doctoral dissertation, would make such an important statement in French. But I am confident that he did make it, and I think I know what brought it on. After Marx and his wife Jenny had moved to London, where they lost three of their six children to illness and lived in squalor for many years, they were often visited by a young German refugee named Pieper. This guy was a total “noodnik” (there are “noodniks” all along the political spectrum stationed ten feet apart, but there is a special Left Noodnik, hired by the police, to drive revolutionaries batty). Pieper (I swear, I did not make him up) hovered around Marx gasping with admiration, once offered to translate Das Kapital into English, which he could barely speak, and kept organising Karl Marx Clubs, exasperating Marx more and more by insisting that every word Marx uttered was holy. And one day Marx caused Pieper to have a severe abdominal cramp when he said to him: “Thanks for inviting me to speak at your Karl Marx Club. But I can’t. I’m not a Marxist.”

From his conclusion:

He epitomised his own warning, that people, however advanced in their thinking, were weighted down by the limitations of their time. Still, Marx gave us acute insights, inspiring visions. I can’t imagine Marx being pleased with the “socialism” of the Soviet Union. He would have been a dissident in Moscow, I like to think. His idea of the “dictatorship of the proletariat” was the Paris Commune of 1871, where endless arguments in the streets and halls of the city gave it the vitality of a grass roots democracy, where overbearing officials could be immediately booted out of office by popular vote, where the wages of government leaders could not exceed that of ordinary workers, where the guillotine was destroyed as a symbol of capital punishment. Marx once wrote in the New York Times that he did not see how capital punishment could be justified “in a society glorifying in its civilisation.”

Perhaps the most precious heritage of Marx’s thought is his internationalism, his hostility to the nation state, his insistence that ordinary people have no nation they must obey and give their lives for in war, that we are all linked to one another across the globe as human beings. This is not only a direct challenge to modern capitalist nationalism, with its ugly evocations of hatred for “the enemy” abroad, and its false creation of a common interest for all within certain artificial borders. It is also a rejection of the narrow nationalism of contemporary “Marxist” states, whether the Soviet Union, or China, or any of the others.

In addition to the important concepts of Marx mentioned by Zinn, I would add  that of commodity fetishism. The idea that human relationships get transformed into things that are given a price and bought and sold on the open market has greater resonance today, when thre is virtually nothing that isn’t for sale. Beauty? Buy it here! Love? This way?

And my own profession of psychotherapy has transformed intimacy into a commodity, available to those who can afford it. In typical capitalist fashion, now that therapeutic intimacy is a commodity, its providers are having their wages squeezed lower and lower. Marx, presciently predicted the proletarianization of all. In our time we are seeing this prediction being realized as “professionals,”  doctors, lawyers, therapists, etc., are increasing turned into employees, “wage slaves”, loosing control of their professional destinies and doing the bidding of others.

Add comment April 20th, 2007