Psyche, Science, and Society

83rd anniversary of the arrest of John Scopes

Crooks and Liars tell us that today is the 83rd anniversary of John Scopes’ arrest for the crime of teaching evolution. In memory, here’s a selection from Inherit the Wind:

Add comment May 5th, 2008

Electronic surveillance is primarily aimed at political enemies and dissidents

In an LA Times op-ed, Julian Sanchez points out what is really at stake in the unbridled wiretapping power of the state that the President is trying to create, the ability to blackmail or destroy political opponents. We’ve seen this power used this week to bring down Elliott Spitzer. How many other victims haven’t we heard about, perhaps because they decide to go quietly? And how many victims are incarcerated? Many, we should assume. Ad many more will be if these powers remain unchecked:

Wiretapping’s true danger

History says we should worry less about privacy and more about political spying.

By Julian Sanchez

As the battle over reforms to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act rages in Congress, civil libertarians warn that legislation sought by the White House could enable spying on “ordinary Americans.” Others, like Sen. Orrin Hatch (R-Utah), counter that only those with an “irrational fear of government” believe that “our country’s intelligence analysts are more concerned with random innocent Americans than foreign terrorists overseas.”

But focusing on the privacy of the average Joe in this way obscures the deeper threat that warrantless wiretaps poses to a democratic society. Without meaningful oversight, presidents and intelligence agencies can — and repeatedly have — abused their surveillance authority to spy on political enemies and dissenters.

The original FISA law was passed in 1978 after a thorough congressional investigation headed by Sen. Frank Church (D-Idaho) revealed that for decades, intelligence analysts — and the presidents they served — had spied on the letters and phone conversations of union chiefs, civil rights leaders, journalists, antiwar activists, lobbyists, members of Congress, Supreme Court justices — even Eleanor Roosevelt and the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. The Church Committee reports painstakingly documented how the information obtained was often “collected and disseminated in order to serve the purely political interests of an intelligence agency or the administration, and to influence social policy and political action.”

Political abuse of electronic surveillance goes back at least as far as the Teapot Dome scandal that roiled the Warren G. Harding administration in the early 1920s. When Atty. Gen. Harry Daugherty stood accused of shielding corrupt Cabinet officials, his friend FBI Director William Burns went after Sen. Burton Wheeler, the fiery Montana progressive who helped spearhead the investigation of the scandal. FBI agents tapped Wheeler’s phone, read his mail and broke into his office. Wheeler was indicted on trumped-up charges by a Montana grand jury, and though he was ultimately cleared, the FBI became more adept in later years at exploiting private information to blackmail or ruin troublesome public figures. (As New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer can attest, a single wiretap is all it takes to torpedo a political career.)

In 1945, Harry Truman had the FBI wiretap Thomas Corcoran, a member of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s “brain trust” whom Truman despised and whose influence he resented. Following the death of Chief Justice Harlan Stone the next year, the taps picked up Corcoran’s conversations about succession with Justice William O. Douglas. Six weeks later, having reviewed the FBI’s transcripts, Truman passed over Douglas and the other sitting justices to select Secretary of the Treasury (and poker buddy) Fred Vinson for the court’s top spot.

“Foreign intelligence” was often used as a pretext for gathering political intelligence. John F. Kennedy’s attorney general, brother Bobby, authorized wiretaps on lobbyists, Agriculture Department officials and even a congressman’s secretary in hopes of discovering whether the Dominican Republic was paying bribes to influence U.S. sugar policy. The nine-week investigation didn’t turn up evidence of money changing hands, but it did turn up plenty of useful information about the wrangling over the sugar quota in Congress — information that an FBI memo concluded “contributed heavily to the administration’s success” in passing its own preferred legislation.

In the FISA debate, Bush administration officials oppose any explicit rules against “reverse targeting” Americans in conversations with noncitizens, though they say they’d never do it.

But Lyndon Johnson found the tactic useful when he wanted to know what promises then-candidate Richard Nixon might be making to our allies in South Vietnam through confidant Anna Chenault. FBI officials worried that directly tapping Chenault would put the bureau “in a most untenable and embarrassing position,” so they recorded her conversations with her Vietnamese contacts.

Johnson famously heard recordings of King’s conversations and personal liaisons with various women. Less well known is that he received wiretap reports on King’s strategy conferences with other civil rights leaders, hoping to use the information to block their efforts to seat several Mississippi delegates at the 1964 Democratic National Convention. Johnson even complained that it was taking him “hours each night” to read the reports.

Few presidents were quite as brazen as Nixon, whom the Church Committee found had “authorized a program of wiretaps which produced for the White House purely political or personal information unrelated to national security.” They didn’t need to be, perhaps. Through programs such as the National Security Agency’s Operation Shamrock (1947 to 1975), which swept up international telegrams en masse, the government already had a vast store of data, and presidents could easily run “name checks” on opponents using these existing databases.

It’s probably true that ordinary citizens uninvolved in political activism have little reason to fear being spied on, just as most Americans seldom need to invoke their 1st Amendment right to freedom of speech. But we understand that the 1st Amendment serves a dual role: It protects the private right to speak your mind, but it serves an even more important structural function, ensuring open debate about matters of public importance. You might not care about that first function if you don’t plan to say anything controversial. But anyone who lives in a democracy, who is subject to its laws and affected by its policies, ought to care about the second.

Harvard University legal scholar William Stuntz has argued that the framers of the Constitution viewed the 4th Amendment as a mechanism for protecting political dissent. In England, agents of the crown had ransacked the homes of pamphleteers critical of the king — something the founders resolved that the American system would not countenance.

In that light, the security-versus-privacy framing of the contemporary FISA debate seems oddly incomplete. Your personal phone calls and e-mails may be of limited interest to the spymasters of Langley and Ft. Meade. But if you think an executive branch unchecked by courts won’t turn its “national security” surveillance powers to political ends — well, it would be a first.

Julian Sanchez is a Washington writer who studies privacy and surveillance.

Add comment March 16th, 2008

Authoritarian discourse and the FISA court

Glenn Greenwald uses the example of the current wiretapping debate to show how far toward the radical authoritarian right our political discourse has gone. When the  FISA court was proposed,   it:

“was considered to be one of the great threats to civil liberties, the very antithesis of how an open, democratic system of government ought to function. The FISA court was long the symbol of how severe are the incursions we’ve allowed into basic civil liberties and open government.

The FISC is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want.”

Now, of course:

“embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or “pro-civil-liberty” view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left — too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal — really just symbolic — limitations on our Government’s ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist.”

Read Greenwald’s article and see how  far we have gone down the road toward the total surveillance state.

Add comment March 3rd, 2008

Rescind order shutting down Wikileaks.org, judge asked

The LA Times reports that a broad range of civil liberties groups are asking the court to void its order shutting down the Wikileaks.org web site:

Judge is asked to rescind shutdown of website

Media and public interest organizations tell the jurist that his order violates constitutional provisions against prior restraint of free speech.

A coalition of media and public interest organizations went to federal court in San Francisco on Tuesday urging a judge to reconsider his order to shut down a muckraking website that publishes leaked documents from businesses and government agencies worldwide.

Lawyers for the Electronic Frontier Foundation, the American Civil Liberties Union, Public Citizen and several news organizations, told U.S. District Judge Jeffrey White that two orders he issued last week against wikileaks.org were prior restraints that violated the 1st Amendment.

Laura Handman, a Washington, D.C., attorney for the news organizations, said White’s order was so expansive that the only way to describe it was as if a judge had shut down a newspaper because of controversy over one article.

“I can’t think of another injunction that was so broad,” said Matt Zimmerman of the Electronic Frontier Foundation, a civil rights group that focuses on digital issues.

White acted in response to a lawsuit filed Feb. 6 by Julius Baer & Co., a Zurich-based bank, alleging that a disgruntled former employee had posted internal documents alleging money-laundering and tax evasion schemes at its Cayman Islands branch.

Wikileaks.org specifically urges readers to post leaked documents in an effort to discourage “unethical behavior” by corporations and government agencies. Among the 1.2 million documents that Wikileaks says it has posted over the last several years is an operations manual for the controversial U.S. prison at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

Julius Baer, represented by the Century City firm Lavely & Singer, past lawyers for several celebrities in battles with news organizations, alleged that the postings violated privacy and bank secrecy laws of Switzerland and the Cayman Islands and posed a serious threat of identity theft.

Judge White issued a temporary restraining order, barring Wikileaks from posting the bank documents on the Internet. White has scheduled a Friday hearing on whether to make the injunction permanent.

White also issued a permanent injunction ordering Dynadot of San Mateo, Wikileak’s domain name registrar, to disable the website’s domain name.

That blocks access to the site through its principal entrance, although the content remains available on mirror sites and through its numerical address.

Dynadot did not contest the judge’s actions. “The only agreement by Dynadot was to comply with the court’s . . . order to preserve evidence,” said the company’s attorney, Garrett D. Murai.

Zimmerman, whose organization filed a motion seeking to intervene in the case, said he was disappointed in Dynadot’s action. He said that a specific provision of the Communications Decency Act providing immunity for an “interactive computer service” protects the company against the bank’s claims.

On a broader level, attorney Thomas Burke and colleagues Handman and Kelli Sager, representing 12 media groups that filed a friend-of-the-court brief, cited the 1971 Supreme Court decision in the Pentagon Papers dispute as authority for their position.

In that case, the Supreme Court rejected the Nixon administration’s bid to bar publication of a secret government history of the Vietnam War.

“The 1st Amendment prohibits prior restraints in nearly every circumstance, even where national security may be at risk and even when the source unlawfully obtained the documents,” said the attorneys, whose clients include the Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press, the Society of Professional Journalists, The Times, Gannett Co. and Hearst.

Public Citizen and the California First Amendment Coalition filed a separate brief contending that the case did not come under U.S. jurisdiction because the parties include subjects of foreign states — the Swiss bank and Wikileaks, many of whose members are abroad.

“In shutting down this website through an unlawful prior restraint, the court has muzzled a very important voice in the fight against corporate and government misdeeds,” said Paul Levy, an attorney with Public Citizen.

Peter Lurie, deputy director of Public Citizen’s health policy wing, filed a declaration saying that the organization frequently uses leaked government documents to bring attention to important public issues, such as the Food and Drug Administration’s consideration of “a drug company plan to conduct research on its new drug in Latin America using a design that the agency acknowledged would be unacceptable in the United States.” After the plan was exposed, the company redesigned its study, Lurie said.

“If Wikileaks is shut down,” Lurie said, “the ability of Public Citizen and its members to access” information from whistle-blowers “will be significantly impaired.”

Attorney William Briggs, who represents Julius Baer, said his firm was preparing a response to the briefs lodged Tuesday. “This is a case that presents a conflict between an individual’s right of privacy versus the press’ ability to publish private information about private individuals,” he said.

“I think the individual privacy rights outweigh the right of the press to report that information because of reasons of identity theft. If financial industry customers do not think their information is protected, those institutions could go out of business.”

Add comment February 27th, 2008

Glenn Greenwald on the Democrats voting away our liberties

Today is a black, very black day. the Senate has voted, overwhelmingly, to authorize the President, this President, to eavesdrop on every email and telephone communication between Americans. Further, they issued a cloak of secrecy to assure that the American people will never discover what illegal eavesdropping actions were committed by their government, the Bush administration. As Glenn Greenwald points out, it took a Democratic Congress to pass this unimaginably horrible legislation. It certainly makes little sense to vote for a Democratic Congress when this is what they do with their power. Greenwald compares this Congress with the actions of the Church Committee that investigated another generation’s far less intrusive surveillance. Harry Reid and Jay Rockefeller have earned my scorn today. they are enemies of freedom. Let no one forget that:

Amnesty Day for Bush and Lawbreaking Telecoms

by Glenn Greenwald

The Senate today — led by Jay Rockefeller, enabled by Harry Reid, and with the active support of at least 12 (and probably more) Democrats, in conjunction with an as-always lockstep GOP caucus — will vote to legalize warrantless spying on the telephone calls and emails of Americans, and will also provide full retroactive amnesty to lawbreaking telecoms, thus forever putting an end to any efforts to investigate and obtain a judicial ruling regarding the Bush administration’s years-long illegal spying programs aimed at Americans. The long, hard efforts by AT&T, Verizon and their all-star, bipartisan cast of lobbyists to grease the wheels of the Senate — led by former Bush 41 Attorney General William Barr and former Clinton Deputy Attorney General Jamie Gorelick — are about to pay huge dividends, as such noble efforts invariably do with our political establishment.

It’s worth taking a step back and recalling that all of this is the result of the December, 2005 story by the New York Times which first reported that the Bush administration was illegally spying on Americans for many years without warrants of any kind. All sorts of “controversy” erupted from that story. Democrats everywhere expressed dramatic, unbridled outrage, vowing that this would not stand. James Risen and Eric Lichtblau were awarded Pulitzer Prizes for exposing this serious lawbreaking. All sorts of Committees were formed, papers written, speeches given, conferences convened, and editorials published to denounce this extreme abuse of presidential power. This was illegality and corruption at the highest level of government, on the grandest scale, and of the most transparent strain.

What was the outcome of all of that sturm und drang? What were the consequences for the President for having broken the law so deliberately and transparently? Absolutely nothing. To the contrary, the Senate is about to enact a bill which has two simple purposes: (1) to render retroactively legal the President’s illegal spying program by legalizing its crux: warrantless eavesdropping on Americans, and (2) to stifle forever the sole remaining avenue for finding out what the Government did and obtaining a judicial ruling as to its legality: namely, the lawsuits brought against the co-conspiring telecoms. In other words, the only steps taken by our political class upon exposure by the NYT of this profound lawbreaking is to endorse it all and then suppress any and all efforts to investigate it and subject it to the rule of law.

To be sure, achieving this took some time. When Bill Frist was running the Senate and Pat Roberts was in charge of the Intelligence Committee, Bush and Cheney couldn’t get this done (the same FISA and amnesty bill that the Senate will pass today stalled in the 2006 Senate). They had to wait until the Senate belonged (nominally) to Harry Reid and, more importantly, Jay Rockefeller was installed as Committee Chairman, and then — and only then — were they able to push the Senate to bequeath to them and their lawbreaking allies full-scale protection from investigation and immunity from the consequences of their lawbreaking.

That’s really the most extraordinary aspect of all of this, if one really thinks about it — it isn’t merely that the Democratic Senate failed to investigate or bring about accountability for the clearest and more brazen acts of lawbreaking in the Bush administration, although that is true. Far beyond that, once in power, they are eagerly and aggressively taking affirmative steps — extraordinary steps — to protect Bush officials. While still knowing virtually nothing about what they did, they are acting to legalize Bush’s illegal spying programs and put an end to all pending investigations and efforts to uncover what happened.

How far we’ve come — really: disgracefully tumbled — from the days of the Church Committee, which aggressively uncovered surveillance abuses and then drafted legislation to outlaw them and prevent them from ever occurring again. It is, of course, precisely those post-Watergate laws which the Bush administration and their telecom conspirators purposely violated, and for which they are about to receive permanent, lawless protection.

What Harry Reid’s Senate is about to do today would be tantamount to the Church Committee — after discovering the decades of abuses of eavesdropping powers by various administrations — proceeding in response to write legislation to legalize unchecked surveillance, bar any subjects of the illegal eavesdropping from obtaining remedies in court, and then pass a bill with no purpose other than to provide retroactive immunity for the surveillance lawbreakers. That would be an absurd and incomparably corrupt nonsequitur, but that is precisely what Harry Reid’s Senate — in response to the NYT’s 2005 revelations of clear surveillance lawbreaking by the administration — is going to do today.

Analogously, in 1973, The Washington Post won the Pulitzer Prize for its work in uncovering the Watergate abuses, and that led to what would have been the imminent bipartisan impeachment of the President until he was forced to resign in disgrace. By stark and depressing contrast, in 2006, Jim Risen, Eric Lichtblau and the NYT won Pulitzer Prizes for their work in uncovering illegal spying on Americans at the highest levels of the Government, and that led to bipartisan legislation to legalize the illegal spying programs and provide full-scale retroactive amnesty for the lawbreakers. That’s the difference between a country operating under the rule of law and one that is governed by lawlessness and lawbreaking license for the politically powerful and well-connected.

Chris Dodd went to the Senate floor last night and gave another eloquent and impassioned speech, warning of the consequences for our country from telecom amnesty. He specifically focused on the permanently and comprehensively suppressive effect it will have on efforts to investigate what the Bush administration did in illegally spying on Americans.

At around 2:25, Sen. Dodd quoted from this blog (from this post specifically regarding last week’s testimony of Michael Mukasey) concerning the consequences for our country from ensuring, as the Senate is about to do, that such blatant and deliberate governmental lawbreaking is protected and goes forever unpunished (h/t selise):

From Frank Church and the bipartisan oversight protections of the post-Watergate abuses in the mid-1970s to Jay Rockefeller, Dick Cheney, legalized warrantless eavesdropping and retroactive telecom amnesty in 2008 — that vivid collapse into the sewer illustrates as potently as anything could what has happened to this country over the last eight years.

Glenn Greenwald was previously a constitutional law and civil rights litigator in New York. He is the author of the New York Times Bestselling book “How Would a Patriot Act?,” a critique of the

Add comment February 12th, 2008

1,000 American lawyers oppose criminal activity by Bush adminstration

First we had the scene of thousands of lawyers in Pakistan fighting that country’s dictator. Now American lawyers are joining in. Over 1,000 have signed a statement calling for Congressional investiagation into abuses, and potential criminality, by the Bush administration:

We, the undersigned lawyers in the United States, have been inspired by the many lawyers in Pakistan who have risked their own liberty and careers in an effort to preserve their nation’s freedoms.

Their courage has deepened our own resolve to defend the rule of law in our nation. As lawyers, we have both a moral and professional responsibility to preserve and defend the Constitution of the United States.

To that end, we are committed to creating a movement of lawyers in this nation dedicated to monitoring and, when appropriate, challenging the actions of our government when those actions threaten our nation’s freedoms.

As our initial act, we are issuing the following statement to the U.S. House and Senate Judiciary Committees, urging hearings into the unconstitutional and possibly criminal actions of the Bush Administration.

Message to House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Committee Chairman Patrick Leahy from

American Lawyers Defending the Constitution

We are lawyers in the United States of America. As such, we have all taken an oath obligating us to defend the Constitution and the rule of law from those who would violate and subvert them, and to hold wrongdoers accountable.

We believe the Bush administration has committed numerous offenses against the Constitution and may have violated federal laws. Evidence exists that it has illegally spied on Americans, tortured and abused men and women in its direct custody, sent others to be tortured by countries like Syria and Egypt, and kept people in prison indefinitely with no chance to challenge the bases of their detention. Moreover, the administration has blatantly defied congressional subpoenas, obstructing constitutional oversight of the executive branch.

Thus, we call on House Judiciary Chairman John Conyers and Senate Judiciary Chairman Patrick Leahy to launch hearings into the possibility that crimes have been committed by this administration in violation of the Constitution, federal statutes, and international treaties. We call for the investigations to go where they must, including into the offices of the President and the Vice President. Should these hearings demonstrate that laws have in fact been broken by this administration, we support all such legal and congressional actions necessary to ensure the survival of our Constitution and the nation we love.

 

Signed,

Sign here.

Add comment December 27th, 2007

Universal Declaration of Human Rights, in honor of the 40th anniversary

In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. We should still aspire to make these noble words a reality, despite all the obstacles:

Universalism Given a Pounding
By Stéphane Bussard
Le Temps

Monday 10 December 2007

On December 10, 1948, the United Nations General Assembly unanimously - less eight abstentions - adopted the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Today, that document is the keystone of nine international treaties. In spite of its normative character, it’s not certain that if the world’s governments had to vote on it again, they would be ready to take the same step on behalf of human dignity.

The UN, for which human rights are one of its three mainstays, has clearly grasped the danger. This Monday, it is launching a vast, year-long operation to sensitize people to the rights contained in the Universal Declaration. We have never before seen the UN system mobilized to this degree for any cause. But there is an emergency. The universality of human rights has rarely been as beaten down in the name of dubious cultural and religious relativism. American citizens are being deprived of their fundamental rights in the name of a vital struggle against terrorism. An Iranian addict was executed in the name of Islam.

The real problem with human rights is that they never got past the Cold War. The high commissioner for human rights, Louise Arbour, agrees. The countries of the North swear by the great civil liberties only, while those of the South favor economic and social rights. This antagonistic perception is devastating for the cause. It underlies the serious tensions between the Human Rights Council in Geneva and UN headquarters in New York. It also undermines, whatever people may say, the effectiveness of that Council, still divided into regional blocs. Consequently, the reanimation of the Universal Declaration comes at the right time. So that, as Eleanor Roosevelt declared in 1948, the document may become the “Magna Carta for all humanity.”

---

Universal Declaration of Human Rights
United Nations Department of Public InformationPreamble

Whereas recognition of the inherent dignity and of the equal and inalienable rights of all members of the human family is the foundation of freedom, justice and peace in the world,

Whereas disregard and contempt for human rights have resulted in barbarous acts which have outraged the conscience of mankind, and the advent of a world in which human beings shall enjoy freedom of speech and belief and freedom from fear and want has been proclaimed as the highest aspiration of the common people,

Whereas it is essential, if man is not to be compelled to have recourse, as a last resort, to rebellion against tyranny and oppression, that human rights should be protected by the rule of law,

Whereas it is essential to promote the development of friendly relations between nations,

Whereas the peoples of the United Nations have in the Charter reaffirmed their faith in fundamental human rights, in the dignity and worth of the human person and in the equal rights of men and women and have determined to promote social progress and better standards of life in larger freedom,

Whereas Member States have pledged themselves to achieve, in cooperation with the United Nations, the promotion of universal respect for and observance of human rights and fundamental freedoms,

Whereas a common understanding of these rights and freedoms is of the greatest importance for the full realization of this pledge,

Now, therefore,

The General Assembly,

Proclaims this Universal Declaration of Human Rights as a common standard of achievement for all peoples and all nations, to the end that every individual and every organ of society, keeping this Declaration constantly in mind, shall strive by teaching and education to promote respect for these rights and freedoms and by progressive measures, national and international, to secure their universal and effective recognition and observance, both among the peoples of Member States themselves and among the peoples of territories under their jurisdiction.

Article 1

All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights. They are endowed with reason and conscience and should act towards one another in a spirit of brotherhood.

Article 2

Everyone is entitled to all the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration, without distinction of any kind, such as race, colour, sex, language, religion, political or other opinion, national or social origin, property, birth or other status.

Furthermore, no distinction shall be made on the basis of the political, jurisdictional or international status of the country or territory to which a person belongs, whether it be independent, trust, non-self-governing or under any other limitation of sovereignty.

Article 3

Everyone has the right to life, liberty and security of person.

Article 4

No one shall be held in slavery or servitude; slavery and the slave trade shall be prohibited in all their forms.

Article 5

No one shall be subjected to torture or to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment.

Article 6

Everyone has the right to recognition everywhere as a person before the law.

Article 7

All are equal before the law and are entitled without any discrimination to equal protection of the law. All are entitled to equal protection against any discrimination in violation of this Declaration and against any incitement to such discrimination.

Article 8

Everyone has the right to an effective remedy by the competent national tribunals for acts violating the fundamental rights granted him by the constitution or by law.

Article 9

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 10

Everyone is entitled in full equality to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal, in the determination of his rights and obligations and of any criminal charge against him.

Article 11

1. Everyone charged with a penal offence has the right to be presumed innocent until proved guilty according to law in a public trial at which he has had all the guarantees necessary for his defence.
2. No one shall be held guilty of any penal offence on account of any act or omission which did not constitute a penal offence, under national or international law, at the time when it was committed. Nor shall a heavier penalty be imposed than the one that was applicable at the time the penal offence was committed.

Article 12

No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation. Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 13

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of movement and residence within the borders of each State.
2. Everyone has the right to leave any country, including his own, and to return to his country.

Article 14

1. Everyone has the right to seek and to enjoy in other countries asylum from persecution.
2. This right may not be invoked in the case of prosecutions genuinely arising from non-political crimes or from acts contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 15

1. Everyone has the right to a nationality.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his nationality nor denied the right to change his nationality.

Article 16

1. Men and women of full age, without any limitation due to race, nationality or religion, have the right to marry and to found a family. They are entitled to equal rights as to marriage, during marriage and at its dissolution.
2. Marriage shall be entered into only with the free and full consent of the intending spouses.
3. The family is the natural and fundamental group unit of society and is entitled to protection by society and the State.

Article 17

1. Everyone has the right to own property alone as well as in association with others.
2. No one shall be arbitrarily deprived of his property.

Article 18

Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19

Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Article 20

1. Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
2. No one may be compelled to belong to an association.

Article 21

1. Everyone has the right to take part in the government of his country, directly or through freely chosen representatives.
2. Everyone has the right to equal access to public service in his country.
3. The will of the people shall be the basis of the authority of government; this will shall be expressed in periodic and genuine elections which shall be by universal and equal suffrage and shall be held by secret vote or by equivalent free voting procedures.

Article 22

Everyone, as a member of society, has the right to social security and is entitled to realization, through national effort and international co-operation and in accordance with the organization and resources of each State, of the economic, social and cultural rights indispensable for his dignity and the free development of his personality.

Article 23

1. Everyone has the right to work, to free choice of employment, to just and favourable conditions of work and to protection against unemployment.
2. Everyone, without any discrimination, has the right to equal pay for equal work.
3. Everyone who works has the right to just and favourable remuneration ensuring for himself and his family an existence worthy of human dignity, and supplemented, if necessary, by other means of social protection.
4. Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests.

Article 24

Everyone has the right to rest and leisure, including reasonable limitation of working hours and periodic holidays with pay.

Article 25

1. Everyone has the right to a standard of living adequate for the health and well-being of himself and of his family, including food, clothing, housing and medical care and necessary social services, and the right to security in the event of unemployment, sickness, disability, widowhood, old age or other lack of livelihood in circumstances beyond his control.
2. Motherhood and childhood are entitled to special care and assistance. All children, whether born in or out of wedlock, shall enjoy the same social protection.

Article 26

1. Everyone has the right to education. Education shall be free, at least in the elementary and fundamental stages. Elementary education shall be compulsory. Technical and professional education shall be made generally available and higher education shall be equally accessible to all on the basis of merit.
2. Education shall be directed to the full development of the human personality and to the strengthening of respect for human rights and fundamental freedoms. It shall promote understanding, tolerance and friendship among all nations, racial or religious groups, and shall further the activities of the United Nations for the maintenance of peace.
3. Parents have a prior right to choose the kind of education that shall be given to their children.

Article 27

1. Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.
2. Everyone has the right to the protection of the moral and material interests resulting from any scientific, literary or artistic production of which he is the author.

Article 28

Everyone is entitled to a social and international order in which the rights and freedoms set forth in this Declaration can be fully realized.

Article 29

1. Everyone has duties to the community in which alone the free and full development of his personality is possible.
2. In the exercise of his rights and freedoms, everyone shall be subject only to such limitations as are determined by law solely for the purpose of securing due recognition and respect for the rights and freedoms of others and of meeting the just requirements of morality, public order and the general welfare in a democratic society.
3. These rights and freedoms may in no case be exercised contrary to the purposes and principles of the United Nations.

Article 30

Nothing in this Declaration may be interpreted as implying for any State, group or person any right to engage in any activity or to perform any act aimed at the destruction of any of the rights and freedoms set forth herein.

Add comment December 11th, 2007

2004 Guantanamo SOP leaked

Last month the 2003 Camp Delta Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) was leaked on Wikileaks. I wrote about the implications of the document for Wikileaks and elsewhere. Today, Wikileaks released the 2004 manual, documenting that not much improved in the gulag over that year. The military has confirmed the authenticity of the document.

I have not had time to write an article on the new SOP.So I’ll reproduce the article of blogger Valtin on the Never In Our Names web site.

Another Major Guantanamo Document Leaked

First it was the leak of the 2003 Standard Operating Procedures (SOP) Manual for Guantanamo. The SOP included procedures for psychological torture and abusive conditions of detention, including long-term isolation to foster dependence upon interrogators and “enhance and exploit the disorientation and disorganization felt by a newly arrived detainee in the interrogation process”. Also, prisoners were hidden from the International Red Cross.

The military assured critics that “SOPs by definition, undergo periodic review and change as situations warrant. Detention operations at JTF-GTMO have evolved significantly since 2003…”

Now Wikileaks has released a copy of the 2004 SOP, and guess what? Nothing changed, unless (mostly) for the worse! As the Washington Post notes, since the Supreme Court “prepares to hear arguments this week on the rights of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, the public is getting another peek at how detainees have been treated there.”

Wikileaks has analyzed the changes from the 2003 to 2004 Guantanamo SOP, even placing copies of the relevant passages changed in a side-by-side fashion.Nothing has changed regarding the conditions of confinement. Detainees are still placed in a minimum of 30 days total isolation upon transfer to Guantanamo. Such isolation can be extended, if approved.

Use of Isolation in Interrogations

How bad is isolation? Bad enough that Donald Rumsfeld himself felt it warranted a “caution” in his April 16, 2003 memo authorizing certain aggressive forms of interrogation, i.e., torture.

Caution: the use of isolation as an interrogation technique requires detailed implementation instructions, including specific guidelines regarding the length of isolation, medical and psychological review, and approvals for extension of the length of by the appropriate level in the chain of command. This technique is not know to have been generally used for interrogation purposes for longer than 30 days. Those nations that believe that detainees are subject to POW protections may view use of this technique as inconsistent with the requirements of Geneva III, Article 13 which provides that POWs must be protected against acts of intimidation; Article 14 which provides that POWs are entitled to respect for their person; Article 34 which prohibits coercion and Article 126 which ensures access and basic standards of treatment. Although the provisions of Geneva are not applicable to the interrogation of unlawful combatants, consideration should be given to these views prior to application of this technique.

Rumsfeld — bureaucrat that he is — concentrates on the legal obstacles to the use of isolation. But the psychological components have been well studied for decades. The following is from a 1961 article on use of isolation for interrogations written by Lawrence Hinkle, then a psychiatrist at Cornell Medical Center, and a CIA consultant (link to quote can be found here, emphasis in quote is mine):

It is well known that prisoners, especially if they have not been isolated before, may develop a syndrome similar in most of its features to the “brain syndrome”…. They become dull, apathetic, and in due time they become disoriented and confused; their memories become defective and they experience hallucinations and delusions…. their ability to impart accurate information may be as much impaired as their capacity to resist an interrogator….

From the interrogator’s viewpoint it has seemed to be the ideal way of “breaking down” a prisoner, because, to the unsophisticated, it seems to create precisely the state that the interrogator desires: malleability and the desire to talk, with the added advantage that one can delude himself that he is using no force or coercion…. However, the effect of isolation on the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved, or deprived of sleep.

What’s Changed in 2004 SOP?

Please reference both documents (2003 and 2004) and Wikileaks analysis page for specifics. But let me summarize as best I can.

First, though, what hasn’t changed.

1. Continuation of prolonged isolation of prisoners.

2. Continuation of use of “Military Working Dogs” for “Psychological deterrence”

3. Hiding of prisoners from the International Committee of the Red Cross

4. Toilet paper is still considered a luxury or “comfort item” that can be utilized as a reward.

5. Restrictions of access to a chaplain.

Both manuals assert that detainees will be treated in accordance with the “spirit” of the Geneva conventions “to the degree consistent with military needs”, but never assert that the conventions are actually being followed at Guantanamo. Put into practice, neither manual complies with the Geneva conventions.

Changes from 2003 to 2004

1. The term “Maximum Security Unit” is changed to “Special Housing Unit” (SHU).

2. A Koran is now allowed in SHU, though not prayer bead or prayer cap.

3. New details on use of pepper spray on inmates

4. The right to read camp rules in detainees native language is eliminated.

5. SOP procedures are to be reviewed every 30 vs. 120 days

6. Access and authority of chaplains is further reduced. (The folks at Wikileaks write that this is “probably in response to the actions of James Yee, the prison chaplain who spoke out about conditions at Guantanamo Bay.”)

7. New procedures regarding release of detainees, which are to be orchestrated in part by PSY OPS (psychological operations team).

8. Soldiers are no longer required to carry a “US SOUTHCOM Human Rights Standing Orders” card on their persons at all times.

9. No dictionaries, magazines or books about English or geography.

10. Orwellian changes in language – for instance, references to suicide now called “self-harm”. Also, “hunger strikes” are now “voluntary total fasting”!

More Leaks, But One Conclusion

Wikileaks has also published today a “sensitive US military manual entitled “Detainee Operations in a Joint Environment”, which is a defense-wide instruction manual for detainee operations including rendition flights, which has yet to be been analyzed”. A quick look by this author shows that the use of psychologists and psychiatrists in Behavioral Consultant Teams (BSCTs) were endemic across the entire theater of the Global War on Terror (GWOT, as they like to call it). These BSCTs were an integral part of interrogation teams, and their use as engendered their own controversy in medical and psychology circles.

The conclusion to this brief look at another major look at U.S. government secret detention operations is simple and clear. The Pentagon’s denials around mistreatment are false. Their claims that things have changed and revelations are out of date are false. A major gulag has sprung up in our midst over the last five years, and the lack of rights attendant upon this in such centers, and an attack on rights here in the “homeland” continues unabated.

All readers should link out of this article and read Linda Greenhouse’s excellent analysis over at the New York Times on Boumediene v. Bush, which looks at the rights of “enemy combatants,” the suppression of habeas corpus, and the bogus military commissions (really kangaroo courts) set up by Bush and the Pentagon (and approved in advance by Congress) under the 2006 Military Commissions Act. I’ll let Ms. Greenhouse get the final words, so you can savor what is at stake:

Each of the three branches of government has made a series of judgments on how to strike the balance between individual liberty and national security in the post-9/11 era. This latest Supreme Court confrontation, round three of the justices’ encounter with the detainee question, reflects an extraordinary interbranch drama, played out as a series of actions and reactions that has now cycled back to where it began: the role of the federal courts.

This third round is potentially the most momentous, because at stake is whether the Supreme Court itself will continue to have a role in defining the balance or whether, as the administration first argued four years ago, the executive branch is to have the final word.

1 comment December 4th, 2007

Guantanamo trials to be based upon secret evidence; Are psychologists helping to generate this “evidence”?

Torture was on the front pages of both the New York Times and the Washington Post today. The New York Times reports that Military Commissions trials at Guantanamo can deny defendants the right to know the identities of the witnesses against them:

Defense lawyers preparing for the war crimes trial of a 21-year-old Guantánamo detainee have been ordered by a military judge not to tell their client — or anyone else — the identity of witnesses against him, newly released documents show.

Of course, mounting a real defense will  be impossible. But, as the defendants have already been convicted by the Bush administration, the trials are a mere formality:

Mr. Khadr’s military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. William C. Kuebler of the Navy, said that while he has been given a list of prosecution witnesses, the judge’s decision requires him to keep secrets from his client and that he would ask Colonel Brownback to revoke the order. He said it treated Mr. Khadr as if he had already been convicted and deprived him of a trial at which the public could assess the evidence against him.

“Instead of a presumption of innocence and of a public trial,” Commander Kuebler said, “we start with a presumption of guilt and of a secret trial.”

Every day we get further confirmation, if any more was needed, of the lawless void at the heart of US detention centers. Torture may, according to some reports, no longer be the practice at Guantanamo. But the place is a monument to arbitrary authority stamping on the face of human rights.Unfortunately, the entire world suffers when the strongest nation becomes a lawless bully, accepting no limits on its arbitrary power.

The American Psychological Association pretends to be ignorant of these abuses. They issue occasional bland statements expressing concern about detention without trial and other abuses. Meanwhile, they turn a blind eye to the possibility, indeed the likelihood, that the psychologist-interrogators they claim are keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective” may be helping generate the secret “evidence” to be used in these kangaroo courts.  If it wasn’t clear years ago, anyone aiding the Guantanamo system by participating in interrogations there is complicit in the massive human rights abuses at the heart of these facilities. Interrogators have no control over the use of the “information” they generate. Even the most humane “rapport-based” interrogations are generating information that can be abused by those in command. Alas, the APA prefers access to the powerful (”ability to influence policy”) to taking an ethical stance. It is time for rank and file psychologists, APA members or not, to rescue the reputation of our profession, complicit as it is in many of the most heinous human rights abuses of the Bush era.

Add comment December 1st, 2007

Government in Padilla case: Constitutional rights are nonexistent

Valtin, at Invictus, calls attention to a Christian Science Monitor article on the governments outrageous assetions in a brief in the Padilla case. They claim that kidnapping a US citizen and torturing him in a military brig for years violates no constitutional right. If they government is correct, constitutional rights are nonexistent. Unfortunately, with the Roberts court, that may, in fact, be the case:

US defends its harsh treatment of an American citizen
The administration offers its legal rationale for the long detention of Jose Padilla.

By Warren Richey

US officials did not violate any clearly established constitutional rights when they held a US citizen in isolated military detention without charge for nearly four years and subjected him to harsh interrogation techniques.

That’s the legal position staked out by Justice Department lawyers who are urging a federal judge in Charleston, S.C., to dismiss a lawsuit filed on behalf of Jose Padilla against former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and nine other current or former US officials. Mr. Padilla was held in military custody from 2002 to 2006 as a suspected Al Qaeda operative and enemy combatant.

The 55-page motion, filed this week, offers the first detailed defense of the government’s aggressive treatment of Padilla during his three years and seven months in military custody. Padilla’s suit says he endured isolation, stress positions, extreme cold, sleep deprivation, and reportedly was subjected to five months of severe sensory deprivation, including near total isolation from human contact.

Mental-health experts who have examined Padilla say the experience has left him with severe mental disabilities, including post-traumatic stress disorder.

Government lawyers made no reference to Padilla’s diagnosed psychological problems. They told US District Judge Henry Floyd that such a lawsuit, if allowed to progress, would interfere with military decisionmaking, aid the enemy, and make the US more vulnerable to terrorist attack.

“It would be difficult to devise a more effective fettering of executive branch officials than to allow enemy combatants to trade a battlefield in Afghanistan for a battlefield in the US legal system,” Barbara Bowens, civil chief of the US Attorney’s Office in South Carolina, says in her brief.

After nearly four years in military custody, Padilla was transferred to the criminal-justice system in January 2006. He was convicted in August in a Miami terror-conspiracy trial and is set to be sentenced in December. An appeal is expected.

Although Padilla was placed on trial and convicted in Miami, no court has fully assessed the legality of Padilla’s earlier detention and interrogation in military custody. Government lawyers say such an assessment is unwarranted.

“Padilla’s designation, detention, and interrogation as an enemy combatant did not violate any clearly established constitutional rights,” Ms. Bowens says in her brief.

“It cannot be said that there were any constitutional ‘bright lines’ applicable to Padilla’s case which the [government] could be held liable for transgressing,” Bowens writes.

The issue of “clearly established” rights is important because government officials are protected by immunity from such lawsuits even when rights may have been violated. They lose that immunity, however, if the violated rights are so obvious to a reasonable person that they are considered “clearly established.”

“Officials are not liable for bad guesses in gray areas,” Bowens notes. “They are liable for transgressing bright lines.”

Padilla’s lawyers believe the lines in his case are clear and clearly established. In their 30-page complaint, they charge that Padilla “suffered gross physical and psychological abuse at the hands of federal officials as part of a scheme of abusive interrogation intended to break down [his] humanity and his will to live.”

The complaint says US officials violated Padilla’s constitutionally protected rights to consult a lawyer, to gain access to the courts, to practice his religion and associate with family and friends without government interference, and to be free from coercive interrogation, free from cruel and unusual punishment, and free from illegal and arbitrary detention.

Fundamentally at issue in the Padilla case is whether such constitutional guarantees continue to protect a US citizen seized on US soil and held without charge in a US-based military prison once the citizen is designated an enemy combatant.

Bowens says the issue has already been decided by a federal appeals-court panel in Richmond that upheld Padilla’s military detention in September 2005. As a result, she says, Padilla’s lawyers should be precluded from raising any constitutional claims – even claims related to Padilla’s interrogation and isolation.

Some legal analysts say they are alarmed by the sweep of the government’s position. “The notion that there is absolutely no limit in how the government treats US citizen detainees strikes me as a disturbing proposition,” says Stephen Vladeck, a law professor at American University in Washington, D.C. “Most people would have thought before the Padilla case that the government can’t simply do whatever it wants to a US citizen in military custody.”

Given the government’s reliance on “clearly established” law, the Padilla civil case could present an ironic twist in the long and heated debate over Bush administration tactics in the war on terror. White House and Justice Department officials worked hard in the years since the 9/11 attacks to maximize legal flexibility in dealing with detainees. They sought to clarify the law in a way that would protect interrogators, soldiers, and other US officials from civil suits and war-crimes charges.

Instead of clarification, the efforts triggered debates both within and outside the administration over what the law should be.

Now, legal analysts say, the administration may rely on the lingering uncertainty to help shield US officials from legal liability. “It will make it a lot harder for plaintiffs [like Padilla] to win a lawsuit because there is a much better argument that the relevant laws aren’t clearly established,” Professor Vladeck says.

“Even though Padilla’s rights may have been violated, the real question is whether it was clearly established that what the government was doing to him was illegal,” Vladeck says. “One can’t help but wonder based on the torture debate whether anything was clearly established.”

I’m waiting to hear that the American Psychological Association, which claims to abhor torture, but has never seen it, will intervene in the case with either a brief or a press statement denouncing the alleged torture of Padilla. Ihope I don’t wait in vain.

Add comment October 25th, 2007