Psyche, Science, and Society

Israeli and World Medical Associations should stop double standard, investigate Israeli physicians’ torture complicity

Antony Lerman, writing in the Guardian, calls upon the Israeli Medical Association to investigate reports that Israeli physicians are complicit in torture. The World Medical Association should also stop its double standard and investigate reports of Israeli abuse, just as they responded to reported abuses by Iran:

Israel’s doctors must allay torture fears
Allegations of Israeli doctors colluding in the torture of Palestinians must be investigated

By Antony Lerman

One of the disturbing features of the persistent use of torture by many countries in conflict situations around the world is the role some doctors play in condoning it. The World Medical Association (WMA), which “promot[es] the highest possible standards of medical ethics, [and] provides ethical guidance to physicians”, is crystal clear on this practice. Its 1975 Tokyo declaration states unequivocally that “physicians shall not countenance, condone or participate in the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman or degrading procedures, and in all situations, including armed conflict and civil conflict”. True to its principles, in October, in response to reports about the possible collusion of doctors in the abuse of prisoners in Israeli and World Medical , the WMA passed a unanimous motion at its annual meeting in Delhi urging national medical associations to speak out in support of the rights of patients and doctors there. But is the WMA being selective in its condemnations?

The specific problem of doctors’ complicity in the torture of detainees in the Middle East was raised at an international patients’ rights conference in Turkey in November. In a presentation she made, Dr Ruchama Marton, head of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel (PHR-I), called for the WMA to play a central role in establishing a network “to voice complaints and provide assistance to those who are willing to struggle against torture”. National medical associations and human rights organisations should work together “to campaign against torture in general and against the participation of physicians in torture procedures”. In saying this, Marton was thinking about what some regard as the very unsatisfactory situation in Israel.

Evidence has been produced by the Public Committee Against Torture in Israel (PCATI) and PHR-I of doctors examining interrogated Palestinians before, during or after torture without documenting, reporting or resisting, and by providing medical documents and information to the bodies responsible for the torturing. These are all expressly prohibited under WMA and Israel Medical Association (IMA) guidelines, as is even the presence of a doctor where there is torture.

These allegations have never been seriously investigated by the IMA, despite persistent urging by PHR-I as part of its long struggle against the use of torture and its bringing of the issue to the attention of the WMA. In the summer the IMA cut ties with the human rights body, accusing it of fomenting antisemitism. Dr Yoram Blachar, the chairman of the IMA, wrote in a letter that “the outrageous situation is that PHR’s activity serves as fertile ground for antisemitism, anti-Israelism and anti-Zionism”.

In May, a letter sent to the WMA council through the chairman, Dr Edward Hill, signed by 725 doctors from 43 countries, and supported by PHR-I, requested that the WMA investigate the IMA for failing to conform to its code on the absolute prohibition of doctors participating in and condoning torture. And it called for the immediate resignation of the then president of the WMA, Blachar. In November, Dr Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at the University of London, convenor of the group who signed the May letter, wrote to the new WMA president, Dr Dana Hanson, on behalf of the lead signatory Professor Alan Meyers of Boston University, and again pressed for action to investigate the IMA. And he also referred to the apparent discrepancy between the treatment of reports of collusion in torture in Iran and in Israel. At the end of October, Meyers spoke to WMA council chair Dr Edward Hill and was told that the WMA would neither be responding to nor commenting on the May letter. So far, that stance seems remain in place.

The current situation is deeply unsatisfactory. Even though Israel’s supreme court in 1999 finally ruled that methods of torture used at that time by the security forces were illegal, a loophole was left for interrogators who tortured in “ticking bomb” situations, which ultimately allowed old forms of torture to creep back in by the mid-2000s, as a 2007 report by PCATI showed. So there is good reason to be seriously concerned about the use of torture today.

It is important to recognise that torture would not be possible without the support and safety net of doctors and that doctors are key in exposing and stopping the practice. Israel therefore needs to do two things. First, allegations that Israeli doctors colluded in torture must be confronted and thoroughly investigated. Otherwise, this ongoing affair can only damage the reputation of the vast majority of doctors in Israel, many of whom belong to PHR-I, who will have no truck whatsoever with torture and who assiduously apply their principles of medical ethics equally to all who come into their care, irrespective of national, ethnic or religious origin.

Second, PHR-I proposals for guidelines to help doctors identify torture and for legislation that would make it obligatory to report suspicion of torture and protect whistleblowers – measures that would protect doctors’ independence and make it much harder for interrogators to use torture – must be adopted by the IMA and the government.

No double standards are being applied to Israel here. By implementing the proposals, Israel would simply be conforming to WMA guidelines – and doing at least one thing that would help repair its international position.

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1 comment December 23rd, 2009

Guardian: CIA colluding with Palestinian torturers

The Guardian reports that the CIA is complicit in Palestinan Authority torture of Hamas members:

Palestinian CIA working with Palestinian security agents
US agency co-operating with Palestinian counterparts who allegedly torture Hamas supporters in West Bank

By Ian Cobain

security agents who have been detaining and allegedly torturing supporters of the Islamist organisation Hamas in the West Bank have been working closely with the CIA, the Guardian has learned.

Less than a year after Barack Obama signed an executive order that prohibited torture and provided for the lawful interrogation of detainees in US custody, evidence is emerging the CIA is co-operating with security agents whose continuing use of torture has been widely documented by human rights groups.

The relationship between the CIA and the two Palestinian agencies involved – Preventive Security Organisation (PSO) and General Intelligence Service (GI) – is said by some western diplomats and other officials in the region to be so close that the American agency appears to be supervising the Palestinians’ work.

One senior western official said: “The [Central Intelligence] Agency consider them as their property, those two Palestinian services.” A diplomatic source added that US influence over the agencies was so great they could be considered “an advanced arm of the war on terror”.

While the CIA and the Palestinian Authority (PA) deny the US agency controls its Palestinian counterparts, neither denies that they interact closely in the West Bank. Details of that co-operation are emerging as some human rights organisations are beginning to question whether US intelligence agencies may be turning a blind eye to abusive interrogations conducted by other countries’ intelligence agencies with whom they are working. According to the Palestinian watchdog al-Haq, human rights in the West Bank and Gaza have “gravely deteriorated due to the spreading violations committed by Palestinian actors” this year.

Most of those held without trial and allegedly tortured in the West Bank have been supporters of Hamas, which won the Palestinian elections in 2006 but is denounced as a terrorist organisation by the PA – which in turn is dominated by the rival Fatah political faction – and by the US and EU. In the Gaza Strip, where Hamas has been in control for more than two years, there have been reports of its forces detaining and torturing Fatah sympathisers in the same way.

Among the human rights organisations that have documented or complained about the mistreatment of detainees held by the PA in the West Bank are Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, al-Haq and the Israeli watchdog B’Tselem. Even the PA’s human rights commission has expressed “deep concern” over the mistreatment of detainees.

The most common complaint is that detainees are severely beaten and subjected to a torture known as shabeh, during which they are shackled and forced to assume painful positions for long periods. There have also been reports of sleep deprivation, and of large numbers of detainees being crammed into small cells to prevent rest. Instead of being brought before civilian courts, almost all the detainees enter a system of military justice under which they need not be brought before a court for six months.

According to PA officials, between 400 and 500 Hamas sympathisers are held by the PSO and GI.

Some of the mistreatment has been so severe that at least three detainees have died in custody this year. The most recent was Haitham Amr, a 33-year-old nurse and Hamas supporter from Hebron who died four days after he was detained by GI officials last June. Extensive bruising around his kidneys suggested he had been beaten to death. Among those who died in GI custody last year was Majid al-Barghuti, 42, an imam at a village near Ramallah.

While there is no evidence that the CIA has been commissioning such mistreatment, human rights activists say it would end promptly if US pressure was brought to bear on the Palestinian authorities.

Shawan Jabarin, general director of al-Haq, said: “The Americans could stop it any time. All they would have to do is go to [prime minister] Salam Fayyad and tell him they were making it an issue.. Then they could deal with the specifics: they could tell him that detainees needed to be brought promptly before the courts.”

A diplomat in the region said “at the very least” US intelligence officers were aware of the torture and not doing enough to stop it. He added: “There are a number of questions for the US administration: what is their objective, what are their rules of engagement? Do they train the GI and PSO according to the manual which was established by the previous administration, including water-boarding? Are they in control, or are they just witnessing?”

Sa’id Abu-Ali, the PA’s interior minister, accepted detainees had been tortured and some had died, but said such abuses had not been official policy and steps were being taken to prevent them. He said such abuses “happen in every country in the world”. Abu-Ali sought initially to deny the CIA was “deeply involved” with the two Palestinian intelligence agencies responsible for the torture of Hamas sympathisers, but then conceded that links did exist. “There is a connection, but there is no supervision by the Americans,” he said. “It is solely a Palestinian affair. But the Americans help us.”

The CIA does not deny working with the PSO and GI in the West Bank, although it will not say what use it has made of intelligence extracted during the interrogation of Hamas supporters. But it denies turning what one official described as “a Nelson’s eye to abuse”.

The CIA’s spokesman, Paul Gimigliano, denied it played a supervisory role over the PSO or GI. “The notion that this agency somehow runs other intelligence services … is simply wrong,” he said. “The CIA … only supports, and is interested in, lawful methods that produce sound intelligence.”

Concern about detainee abuse is growing in the West Bank despite an effort by the international community to create Palestinian institutions that will guarantee greater security as a first step towards creating a Palestinian state. More than half of the PA’s $2.8bn (£1.66bn) budget came from international donors last year; more than a quarter was swallowed up by the ministry of the interior and national security. Human Rights Watch and al-Haq have said that in raising the security capacity of the PA, donor countries have a responsibility to ensure it observes international human rights standards.

At the heart of the international effort is the creation of the Palestinian national security force, a 7,500-strong gendarmerie trained by US, British, Canadian and Turkish army officers under the command of a US general, Keith Dayton. Many Palestinians blame Dayton for the mistreatment of Hamas sympathisers, although the general’s remit does not extend to either of the intelligence agencies responsible.

Some in Dayton’s team are said to have been warned by senior CIA officers that they should not attempt to interfere in the work of the PSO or GI. Privately, some of them are said to fear that the mistreatment of detainees, and the anger this is arousing among the population, may undermine their mission. One source said: “I know that Dayton and his crew are very concerned about what is happening in those detention centres because they know it can jeopardise their work.”

December 18th, 2009

Anthopologists oppose counterinsurgency use of knowledge

TIME covers the controversy in anthropology around the military’s use of social scientists in its Human Terrain Systems program. Unlike the situation in psychology, where the American Psychological Association is totally in bed with the military-intelligence establishment, anthropologists have taken an ethical stand. Interestingly, the authors of the American Anthropological Association report condemning the HTS program includes several anthropologists who work with the military. [The AAA has links to additional press accounts of this issue on their web page announcing the report's release.]:

Social Science vs. The Pentagon: Should Anthropologists Go to War?

By Christopher Shay

Anthropologists have traditionally had a pretty wonkish reputation, earnestly taking field notes while interviewing a tribal chief, or lecturing in some college classroom about the intricacies of indigenous clan-systems. If the Pentagon has its way, though, more anthropologists will exchange their tweed for military fatigues and leave the halls of academe for the frontlines. For the last two years, the U.S. military has embedded anthropologists and other social scientists with American troops in order to improve the army’s cultural IQ. But last week, the American Anthropological Association (AAA) released a report coming out strongly against the program, saying that both in concept and application, it “can no longer be considered a legitimate professional exercise of anthropology.”

Since 2007, the Pentagon’s Human Terrain System has been placing social scientists in every army combat brigade, regiment and Marine Corps regimental combat team. There are now more than 500 people employed by HTS, a number that is increasing rapidly. On the ground in Iraq and Afghanistan, their job is to gather information and provide commanders with a greater understanding of the local population, reducing the need for lethal force by helping the army determine the needs of the community, according to Steve Fondacaro the project manager at HTS. Secretary of State Robert Gates has publicly praised the project, and one army colonel told Congress that one Human Terrain team reduced violent clashes encountered by his brigade in Afghanistan by 60-70%. As President Barack Obama revamps his Afghanistan strategy, getting ready to send 30,000 more soldiers, HTS is poised to become a major part of America’s war, helping troops navigate in a foreign land. “We’re pleased to find ourselves fully aligned with the goals [of the Obama administration],” says Fondacaro.

But if the military’s program is to continue its expansion in Afghanistan with the nation’s top scholars, it may be facing an uphill battle. The AAA says the program violates its code of ethics — a sort of Hippocratic Oath in which anthropologists vow to do no harm. Two years ago, the AAA condemned the HTS program, but this month’s 72-page report goes into much greater detail about the potential for the military to misuse information that social scientists gather; some anthropologists involved in the report say it’s already happening. David Price, a professor of anthropology at St. Martins University in Washington and one of the co-authors of the AAA report, says the army appears to be using the anthropological information to better target the enemy, which, if true, would be a gross violation of the anthropological code. One Human Terrain anthropologist told the Dallas Morning News that she wasn’t worried if the information she provided was used to kill or capture an insurgent. “The reality is there are people out there who are looking for bad guys to kill,” she said. “I’d rather they did not operate in a vacuum.” Price and other critics see this as proof that the anthropologists don’t have full control over the information they gather and that commanders can use it to kill. “The real fault with Human Terrain is that it doesn’t even try to protect the people being studied,” says Price. “I don’t think it’s accidental that [the Pentagon] didn’t come up with ethical guidelines.”

HTS adamantly denies that its program is designed to help the army improve its targeting, saying on its website that the role of the program “is neither to directly assist in lethal targeting of insurgents nor the collection of actionable military intelligence.” But Ben Wintersteen, who recently finished the nearly five-month HTS training program and has a masters in anthropology, says oversight is lacking. Once on the battlefield, “there’s definitely an intense pressure on the brigade staff to encourage anthropologists to give up the subject,” Wintersteen says. “There’s no way to know when people are violating ethical guidelines on the field.”

Still, Wintersteen, who is waiting to be sent to Iraq through HTS, says the AAA’s decision to attack the program will ultimately put more lives in danger by undermining the organization’s ability to provide guidance and dissuading top talent from joining. So far, HTS has struggled to bring in topflight social scientists with regional knowledge. “It hurts HTS and the people downrange like the American soldiers and the locals who depend on the rational analysis that anthropology brings,” Wintersteen says. In his training class of about 50 people, there were only about 13 social scientists, five with Ph.Ds — many of the others came from a military background. Because of the AAA, “there are a lot of highly motivated, ethical, critical anthropologists who are being discouraged from helping the program.” HTS project manager Fondacaro admits that finding recruits with regional expertise is “very rare,” but, he argues, HTS is creating a population of social scientists with firsthand experience in Iraq and Afghanistan where none existed before.

HTS is not the first time anthropologists have become involved with war efforts. Before the First World War, the field techniques of the discipline were used by the British to administrate and subdue the different cultural groups at the edges of its empire. Later in World War II, anthropologist Ruth Benedict played a key role in President Franklin Roosevelt’s decision to allow the Japanese Emperor’s reign to continue as part of Japan’s surrender to the U.S. According to Price, who has written a book on the use of anthropology during World War II, the majority of American anthropologists were actively involved the Allied war effort. One British anthropologist, Edmund Leach, even led a team of ruthless Kachin fighers — the indigenous group he was studying in Burma — against the nation’s Japanese occupiers.

But the relationship between the military and anthropology soured during the ’60s and early ’70s. In 1964, the U.S. army recruited scholars for Project Camelot, a program whose goals included helping the U.S. army “assist friendly governments in dealing with active insurgency problems” such as in Chile, the project’s test case. The project never moved out of Chile, however; in 1965, once the public got wind of it, Project Camelot was canceled. Later, in 1970, documents stolen from a U.S. anthropologist’s office implicated a number of social scientists in clandestine counterinsurgency efforts in Thailand. These two scandals created an uproar at the AAA, and many anthropologists grew wary of military funded programs. Over the last 30 years, according to an article by Montgomery McFate, the senior social scientist at HTS and a trained anthropologist, “the discipline has become hermetically sealed within its Ivory Tower.”

AAA policy is not against anthropologists helping the military — a few of the co-authors of the AAA report, in fact, work closely with the military. But McFate’s larger point stands: For the last few decades, anthropologists have had little influence in military or foreign policy circles. As American troops adopt a counterinsurgency strategy, cultural knowledge has become a foremost Pentagon concern. They know historically the record for winning a short-term counterinsurgency is not good, so they’ve once again sought out cultural expertise. The discipline’s checkered history, however, has made many anthropologists sensitive to the parallels between HTS and the colonial era. “Anthropology was used in much the same way to help colonial militaries and colonial occupation,” says David Vine, an anthropology professor at American University.

Of course, this hasn’t stopped the military from asking for their help. “What’s been missing is the insight and the experiences that social scientists bring to these kinds of conflicts,” Fondacaro says. The traditional army, he says, is good at treating “the symptoms of insurgency” — fighting armed violent groups or reducing the number of IEDs, for instance — but “what HTS is focused on is the disease. There’s a reason why the population tolerates and sometimes actively supports groups that advocate violence.” That, says Fondacaro, is what HTS is trying to diagnose and ultimately cure.

When it comes down to it, the AAA has no sanctioning power, and the decision whether or not to join HTS comes down to the individual. For now at least, the Pentagon wants to leverage the cultural insights of academics to succeed in Iraq and Afghanistan, but whether HTS has brought more top scholars into the military fold or only widened the schism between academia and the military remains unclear. James Der Derian, a professor of political science at Brown University who recently finished a documentary on HTS, and whose friend and colleague Michael Bhatia was killed in Afghanistan, one of three HTS social scientists to die on duty, says “the emphasis in previous wars has been more about how you defeat the enemy by controlling territory,” but now, “the center of gravity shifted to a psychological territory.” HTS is a clear indication that the Pentagon has realized in order to win the wars of the 21st century, cultural knowledge will need to be integrated into combat operations. And how do we do that exactly? Says Der Derian: “We’re still trying to figure that out.”

December 13th, 2009

Every Afghan airstrike kills the same number of “insurgents”

Anyone who paid close attention to the Iraq war knows that it was not just the Bush administration that routinely lied about the war. For virtually all claims made by the US military on contentious matters later turned out to be false.

In either case, fraud or gross error, we should draw the same implications. If the military is presenting false information regarding how many were killed, there is no reason we should believe other aspects of their report, such as who was killed. Were they “insurgents?” Civilians? Goats? We have no idea until and unless there is independent verification.

Thanks to the Pentagon, this time under President Obama, we are again reminded that Truth is the first casualty of war. What I find saddest is that the media even find government claims of this type, given the extensive track record of lies and obfuscations. Surely any media doing its job would routinely remind its readers that government spokespersons exist to spin and dissemble, not to inform.

December 11th, 2009

Robert Fisk on Obama, the Middle East, and Afghanistan

December 11th, 2009

Condoleeza Rice stars in American Faust

A new documentary, American Faust, that opens Saturday, covers the career of WMD lie promoter and torture enabler Condoleeza Rice. Here is the trailer:

November 18th, 2009

Peter Galbraith pushed Iraqi constitution provisions that could earn him $100 millon

The New York Times reveals that noted foreign policy expert, partial author of the Iraqi Constitution, and advocate of Kurdish autonomy, Peter Galbraith, stands to gain upwards of $100 million from secret investments in Kurdish oil. In other words, he apparently helped fleece the Iraqis of their oil.  Glenn Greenwald relays the story:

The sleazy advocacy of a leading “liberal hawk”
Peter Galbraith’s vast, undisclosed financial interests in the policies he spent years advocating as an “expert.”

By Glenn Greenwald

The New York Times today details the unbelievably sleazy story of Peter Galbraith, one of the Democratic Party’s leading so-called “liberal hawks” and a generally revered Wise Man of America’s Foreign Policy Community.  He was Ambassador to Croatia under the Clinton administration in the mid-1990s and, in March, 2009, the Obama administration (specifically, Richard Holbrooke, Galbraith’s mentor) successfully pressured the U.N. to name Galbraith as the second-in-command in Afghanistan.  The NYT does a good job today of adding some important details to the story, but it was actually uncovered by Norwegian investigative journalists and reported at length a month ago in pieces such as this one by Helena Cobban.  In essence, this highly Serious man has corruptly concealed vast financial stakes in the very policies and positions he has spent years advocating while pretending to be an independent expert.Galbraith was one of the most vocal Democratic supporters of the attack on Iraq, having signed a March 19, 2003 public letter (.pdf) – along with the standard cast of neocon war-lovers such as Bill Kristol, Max Boot, Danielle Pletka, and Robert Kagan – stating that “we all join in supporting the military intervention in Iraq” and “it is now time to act to remove Saddam Hussein and his regime from power.”  As intended, that letter was then praised by outlets such as The Washington Post Editorial Page, gushing that “it is both significant and encouraging that a bipartisan group of influential foreign policy thinkers, veterans of both Democratic and Republican administrations, has signed on to a statement of policy on Iraq that makes sense on the war.”  Throughout 2002 and 2003, Galbraith appeared in numerous outlets — including repeatedly on Fox News and with Bill O’Reilly — presenting himself as a loyal Democrat firmly behind the invasion of Iraq.  In 2002, he was an adviser to Paul Wolfowitz on Kurdistan.

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After playing a key role in enabling the invasion of Iraq, Galbraith first became one of a handful of U.S. officials who worked on writing the Iraqi Constitution, and after he resigned from the government, he then continuously posed as an independent expert on the region and, specifically, an “unpaid” adviser to the Kurds on the Constitution.  Galbraith was an ardent and vocal advocate for Kurdish autonomy, arguing tirelessly in numerous venues for such proposals — including in multiple Op-Eds for The New York Times – and insisting that Kurds must have the right to control oil resources located in Northern Iraq.  Throughout the years of writing those Op-Eds, he was identified as nothing more than “a former United States ambassador to Croatia,” except in one 2007 Op-Ed which vaguely stated that he ”is a principal in a company that does consulting in Iraq and elsewhere.”  When he participated in a New York Times forum in October, 2008 — regarding what the next President should be required to answer — he unsurprisingly posed questions that advocated for regional autonomy for Iraqis generally and Kurds specifically, and he was identified as nothing more than the author of a book about the region.

What Galbraith kept completely concealed all these years was that a company he formed in 2004 came to acquire a large stake in a Kurdish oil field whereby, as the NYT put it, he “stands to earn perhaps a hundred million or more dollars.”  In other words, he had a direct — and vast — financial stake in the very policies which he was publicly advocating in The New York Times, The Washington Post, and countless other American media outlets, where he was presented as an independent expert on the region.  As Cobban wrote:

For the preceding four years, while Galbraith was an influential participant in Iraq-related constitutional and political discussions, he also had an undisclosed financial interest in a KRG-authorised oil development venture. . . .

Here in the U.S., Galbraith has long been associated with the “liberal hawk” wing of the Democratic Party . . . Many members of this group have been liberal idealists – though some of those who, on “liberal” grounds, gave early support to Pres. George W. Bush’s decision to invade Iraq later expressed their regret for adopting that position.

Galbraith has never expressed any such regrets, and last November, he was openly scornful of Bush’s late-term agreement to withdraw from Iraq completely. The revelation that for many years Galbraith had a quite undisclosed financial interest in the political breakup of Iraq may now further reduce the clout, and the ranks, of the remaining liberal hawks.

Unfortunately, that last sentence is likely wishful thinking.  What Galbraith has done, as sleazy and dishonest as it is, is simply par for the course in accountability-free Washington.

Galbraith’s relationship with the Kurds goes back many years.  He undoubtedly knew that overthrowing Saddam would empower his Kurdish friends and their ability to dole out oil contracts.  Indeed, in his own 2006 book, he recounts that he began working on Kurdish autonomy and independence “two weeks after the fall of Saddam Hussein.”  Less than a year later, having helped convince the public — and many Democrats — to invade Iraq, he formed a company that then acquired a huge stake in Kurdish oil.  And he then spent years running around trying to use his status as Foreign Policy Community expert to exploit the war he cheered on for his own massive personal gain, while keeping completely concealed those glaring conflicts of interests.

Reider Visser, a historian of southern Iraq, told The Boston Globe last month:  ”Galbraith has been such a central person to the shaping of the Iraqi Constitution, far more than I think most Americans realize. All those beautiful ideas about principles of federalism and local communities having control are really cast in a different light when the community has an oil field in its midst and Mr. Galbraith has a financial stake.”  So here’s a leading advocate of the war on Iraq who used his influence in the U.S. Government and the Foreign Policy Community — as well as the break-up of Saddam’s regime — to enrich himself on Iraqi oil.  As the NYT put it:

As the scope of Mr. Galbraith’s financial interests in Kurdistan become clear, they have the potential to inflame some of Iraqis’ deepest fears, including conspiracy theories that the true reason for the American invasion of their country was to take its oil. It may not help that outside Kurdistan, Mr. Galbraith’s influential view that Iraq should be broken up along ethnic lines is considered offensive to many Iraqis’ nationalism. Mr. Biden and Mr. Kerry, who have been influenced by Mr. Galbraith’s thinking but do not advocate such a partitioning of the country, were not aware of Mr. Galbraith’s oil dealings in Iraq, aides to both politicians say.

Some officials say that his financial ties could raise serious questions about the integrity of the constitutional negotiations themselves. “The idea that an oil company was participating in the drafting of the Iraqi Constitution leaves me speechless,” said Feisal Amin al-Istrabadi, a principal drafter of the law that governed Iraq after the United States ceded control to an Iraqi government on June 28, 2004.

In effect, he said, the company “has a representative in the room, drafting.”

Remember how all those freakish and paranoid people — on the crazed “Arab street” and in American-hating leftist circles — actually believed in “conspiracy” theories such as the wacky notion that one of the motives for invading Iraq was a desire to exploit its oil resources?

Here we have yet another example of one of America’s most Serious and respected “experts” advocating various policies while maintaining huge, undisclosed financial and personal interests in his advocacy.  He was given access to every major media outlet virtually on demand to do so — the NYT, The Washington Post, NPR, CNN, Fox — all while those interests remained concealed.  His uniting with the country’s most extreme neocons to support the Bush administration’s attack on Iraq didn’t prevent the Obama administration from pushing him to be hired as the U.N.’s number two official in Afghanistan.  He continued to be revered by leading establishment Democrats as an important and respected expert.  In other words, Peter Galbraith is a perfect face showing how America’s Foreign Policy Community and our political debates function.

UPDATE:  Jonathan Schwarz recalls what was done to those who suggested that part of the motive in invading Iraq might have something to do with that country’s oil reserves.

UPDATE II:  The New York Times is forced to publish an Editor’s Note today in light of this story, noting that “Mr. Galbraith signed a contract that obligated him to disclose his financial interests in the subjects of his articles”; he “should have disclosed to readers that Mr. Galbraith could benefit financially” from the policies he was advocating in his Op-Eds; and “had editors been aware of Mr. Galbraith’s financial stake, the Op-Ed page would have insisted on disclosure or not published his articles.”

November 13th, 2009

The stresses of military mental health personnnel

As we ponder the tragedy at Fort hood, the New York Times has a good article on the stresses facing military psychiatrists and other military mental health personnel.

Painful Stories Take a Toll on Military Therapists

By Benedict Carey, Damien Cave, and Lizette Alvarez

Many of the patients who fill the day are bereft, angry, broken. Their experiences are gruesome, their distress lasting and the process of recovery exhausting. The repeated stories of battle and loss can leave the most professional therapist numb or angry.

And hanging over it all, for psychiatrists and psychologists in today’s military, is the prospect of their own deployment — of working under fire in Iraq or Afghanistan, where the Pentagon has assigned more therapists to combat units than in previous wars.

That was the world that Maj. Nidal Malik Hasan, an Army psychiatrist, inhabited until Thursday, when he was accused of one of the worst mass shootings ever on a military base in the United States, an attack that killed 13 and left dozens wounded. Five of the dead were fellow therapists, the Army said.

Major Hasan’s motives are still being investigated. But those who work day in and day out treating the psychological wounds of the country’s warriors say Thursday’s rampage has put a spotlight on the strains of their profession and of the patients they treat.

Major Hasan was one of a thin line of military therapists trying to hold off a rising tide of need. So far this year, 117 soldiers on active duty were reported to have committed suicide. The Army has only 408 psychiatrists — military, civilian and contractors — serving about 553,000 active-duty troops around the world. As a result, some soldiers home from war, suffering from nightmares and panic attacks, say they have waited almost a year to see a psychiatrist.

Many military professionals, meanwhile, describe crushing schedules with 10 or more patients a day, most struggling with devastating trauma or mutilated bodies that are the product of war and the highly advanced care that kept them alive.

Some of those hired to heal others end up needing help themselves. Some go home at night too depressed to talk to their children. Others, like Bret A. Moore, a former Army psychologist at Fort Hood, ultimately quit.

“I planned for a career in the military, but I burned out” after about five years, he said.

The biggest problem, Dr. Moore said, was “compassion fatigue.”

“I thought that was a bogus phenomenon, but it’s true,” he said. “You become detached, you start to feel like you can’t connect with your patients, you run out of empathy. And the last thing you want to do is talk about it with someone else. It really puts a wedge between you and loved ones.”

Whatever the facts in Major Hasan’s case, some therapists who work with the military agree that the tragedy is likely to have a “lasting impact on how we look at mental health providers,” said Dr. Martin Paulus, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, and the Veterans Affairs San Diego Healthcare System.

The Army has added to their ranks in recent years, as the number of soldiers with the diagnosis of post-traumatic stress disorder has climbed to 34,000. But the shooting has raised a pressing question: Who counsels the counselors? Dr. Moore and other therapists who have worked in the military or for Veterans Affairs said that mental health evaluations of therapists themselves were virtually nonexistent.

“I have worked with the Army, the Navy, the V.A., and I’m not aware of any formal, systematic process to evaluate professionals,” said Dr. Andy Morgan, a psychiatrist at the National Center for P.T.S.D.

At Walter Reed, where Major Hasan was in training until recently, Lt. Col. Brett Schneider, a psychiatrist, described a complicated system of checks and balances, including a training committee with superiors and civilians who evaluate residents and mental health staff members.

“There is a lot more built into the processes to keep tabs on each other,” said Colonel Schneider, who spoke on the condition that he not be asked any questions about Major Hasan. “If somebody is starting to get to the point where these things are a problem, there are a number of ways we can intervene.”

Generally, though, the military, like many large civilian employers, relies on self-evaluation and voluntary employee-assistance programs.

“Once training is over, you’re basically on your own,” Dr. Paulus said.

At Fort Hood, the nation’s largest military base, Major Hasan, like other therapists, would have had to manage many patients with severe combat stress. At his relatively high rank, he would have been expected to seek help on his own if he thought he needed it, experts said.

The base sees continual traffic in and out of war zones, and the work conditions are especially stressful, according to at least one report provided to the Army.

Dr. Stephen M. Stahl, a psychiatrist at the University of California, San Diego, who worked on the report, said the base’s program for soldiers returning from war simply lacked the staff it needed. He said there were about 15 psychiatrists on staff, treating hundreds of inpatients and outpatients. Generally, the psychiatrists did not do therapy but prescribed medication.

“They’re so under-resourced that people just don’t end up getting enough care,” Dr. Stahl said.

He added: “It’s a pretty damn stressful place to be. I think it’s a horrible place to practice psychiatry.”

Soldiers described similar situations at many other installations. Jason Yorty, 34, an Arabic linguist with the Army who deployed to Iraq four times and Afghanistan once, said that when he returned to Fort Gordon in Georgia two years ago, the system appeared to be overwhelmed and resistant to diagnosing problems that would require multiple visits.

First, he said, he saw a physician’s assistant at the base, then a clinical social worker, neither of whom agreed that his nightmares and panic attacks amounted to post-traumatic stress disorder. “It took me eight months just to get an appointment to see a psychiatrist,” he said. “When I got there, he blew me off.”

A few weeks later, after he refused the Army psychiatrist’s prescription for a sleep aid, a nonmilitary mental health provider gave him a diagnosis of P.T.S.D.

Experts say that the military has made big strides in taking mental health issues seriously, but that military therapists are sometimes pressured to place the needs of the force above the needs of the patient. Indeed, they can be overruled by commanders who need soldiers in the field.

Since 2001, the military has deployed many soldiers with post-traumatic stress disorder or other ailments. “The focus in the military is readiness,” said Charles Figley, a psychologist at Tulane University. “There is an inherent conflict.”

And in war zones, the relationships between soldiers and mental health providers can be especially fraught. Therapists in Iraq said that they could often do little more than provide a few coping tips to soldiers, just enough to keep them functioning. There were simply too many people and not enough time, as Army officials have acknowledged.

Providing care has its own risks. In studies of therapists working to soothe mental distress in victims of violence, whether criminal, sexual or combat-related, researchers have documented what is called secondary trauma: contact distress, of a kind. In one 2004 study of social workers on cases stemming from the Sept. 11 attacks, researchers found that the more deeply therapists were involved with victims, the more likely they were to experience such trauma. The same associations have been found in doctors working with survivors in war zones.

Dr. Hasan was reportedly facing his first deployment — a prospect that scares even trained fighters, many of whom become increasingly frantic before going to war, according to surveys.

The workload itself is enough to give psychiatrists and psychologists pause. In Iraq, with sectarian violence at its peak in 2007, officials say there were 200 such specialists serving more than 130,000 troops, driving between bases on bomb-rigged roads.

The experience of Lt. Col. Reagon P. Carr was common. In six months with the Second Brigade of the 10th Mountain Division in 2007, he said he saw more than 700 soldiers. In one typical week, he visited three locations, meeting with 36 soldiers who came in for immediate help: 3 were contemplating suicide, a dozen were unable to sleep, 5 said they were apprehensive about returning to a dysfunctional marriage and 16 said they were disgruntled with their leadership.

Few who are deployed feel prepared for this punishing task.

Dr. Peter Linnerooth, a former Army psychologist who treated soldiers in Germany and Iraq and at Fort Hood, said that in Schweinfurt, Germany, he was the sole psychologist for a community of 10,000 people in 2005.

At Fort Hood, he treated a burly man whose job in Iraq was to recover the bodies of soldiers. His patient was devastated by one particular loss, Dr. Linnerooth said.

“He had picked up this corpse that was so badly burned, it weighed about 20 pounds,” he said. “He was this big, tough, awesome guy. For him, it was like picking up his daughter. That was an extreme case. But you get those at least once or twice a week.”

If it turns out that Major Hasan did in fact break partly under the stress of the job and impending deployment, many veterans would not be surprised.

“If this guy can go over the edge, imagine what it is like for the actual combat troops who have been through four or five deployments,” said Bryan Hannah, 22, a disabled Iraq war veteran from San Marcos, Tex., who was stationed at Fort Hood until he was discharged a year ago because of post-traumatic stress disorder and other injuries.

He added, “There are a lot of others who are worse off than him.”

Erica Goode and Gretel C. Kovach contributed reporting.

November 8th, 2009

Engelhardt: Endless war without victory

In a new piece, Tom Engelhardt reminds us what our country has become:

Is America Hooked on War?

By Tom Engelhardt

“War is peace” was one of the memorable slogans on the facade of the Ministry of Truth, Minitrue in “Newspeak,” the language invented by George Orwell in 1948 for his dystopian novel 1984. Some 60 years later, a quarter-century after Orwell’s imagined future bit the dust, the phrase is, in a number of ways, eerily applicable to the United States.

Last week, for instance, a New York Times front-page story by Eric Schmitt and David Sanger was headlined “Obama Is Facing Doubts in Party on Afghanistan, Troop Buildup at Issue.” It offered a modern version of journalistic Newspeak.

“Doubts,” of course, imply dissent, and in fact just the week before there had been a major break in Washington’s ranks, though not among Democrats. The conservative columnist George Will wrote a piece offering blunt advice to the Obama administration, summed up in its headline: “Time to Get Out of Afghanistan.” In our age of political and audience fragmentation and polarization, think of this as the Afghan version of Vietnam’s Cronkite moment.

The Times report on those Democratic doubts, on the other hand, represented a more typical Washington moment. Ignored, for instance, was Wisconsin Senator Russ Feingold’s end-of-August call for the president to develop an Afghan withdrawal timetable. The focus of the piece was instead an upcoming speech by Michigan Senator Carl Levin, chairman of the Armed Services Committee. He was, Schmitt and Sanger reported, planning to push back against well-placed leaks (in the Times, among other places) indicating that war commander General Stanley McChrystal was urging the president to commit 15,000 to 45,000 more American troops to the Afghan War.

Here, according to the two reporters, was the gist of Levin’s message about what everyone agrees is a “deteriorating” U.S. position: “[H]e was against sending more American combat troops to Afghanistan until the United States speeded up the training and equipping of more Afghan security forces.”

Think of this as the line in the sand within the Democratic Party, and be assured that the debates within the halls of power over McChrystal’s troop requests and Levin’s proposal are likely to be fierce this fall. Thought about for a moment, however, both positions can be summed up with the same word: More.

The essence of this “debate” comes down to: More of them versus more of us (and keep in mind that more of them — an expanded training program for the Afghan National Army — actually means more of “us” in the form of extra trainers and advisors). In other words, however contentious the disputes in Washington, however dismally the public now views the war, however much the president’s war coalition might threaten to crack open, the only choices will be between more and more.

No alternatives are likely to get a real hearing. Few alternative policy proposals even exist because alternatives that don’t fit with “more” have ceased to be part of Washington’s war culture. No serious thought, effort, or investment goes into them. Clearly referring to Will’s column, one of the unnamed “senior officials” who swarm through our major newspapers made the administration’s position clear, saying sardonically, according to the Washington Post, “I don’t anticipate that the briefing books for the [administration] principals on these debates over the next weeks and months will be filled with submissions from opinion columnists… I do anticipate they will be filled with vigorous discussion… of how successful we’ve been to date.”

State of War

Because the United States does not look like a militarized country, it’s hard for Americans to grasp that Washington is a war capital, that the United States is a war state, that it garrisons much of the planet, and that the norm for us is to be at war somewhere at any moment. Similarly, we’ve become used to the idea that, when various forms of force (or threats of force) don’t work, our response, as in Afghanistan, is to recalibrate and apply some alternate version of the same under a new or rebranded name — the hot one now being “counterinsurgency” or COIN — in a marginally different manner. When it comes to war, as well as preparations for war, more is now generally the order of the day.

This wasn’t always the case. The early Republic that the most hawkish conservatives love to cite was a land whose leaders looked with suspicion on the very idea of a standing army. They would have viewed our hundreds of global garrisons, our vast network of spies, agents, Special Forces teams, surveillance operatives, interrogators, rent-a-guns, and mercenary corporations, as well as our staggering Pentagon budget and the constant future-war gaming and planning that accompanies it, with genuine horror.

The question is: What kind of country do we actually live in when the so-called U.S. Intelligence Community (IC) lists 16 intelligence services ranging from Air Force Intelligence, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Defense Intelligence Agency to the National Reconnaissance Office and the National Security Agency? What could “intelligence” mean once spread over 16 sizeable, bureaucratic, often competing outfits with a cumulative 2009 budget estimated at more than $55 billion (a startling percentage of which is controlled by the Pentagon)? What exactly is so intelligent about all that? And why does no one think it even mildly strange or in any way out of the ordinary?What does it mean when the most military-obsessed administration in our history, which, year after year, submitted ever more bloated Pentagon budgets to Congress, is succeeded by one headed by a president who ran, at least partially, on an antiwar platform, and who has now submitted an even larger Pentagon budget? What does this tell you about Washington and about the viability of non-militarized alternatives to the path George W. Bush took? What does it mean when the new administration, surveying nearly eight years and two wars’ worth of disasters, decides to expand the U.S. Armed Forces rather than shrink the U.S. global mission?

What kind of a world do we inhabit when, with an official unemployment rate of 9.7% and an underemployment rate of 16.8%, the American taxpayer is financing the building of a three-story, exceedingly permanent-looking $17 million troop barracks at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan? This, in turn, is part of a taxpayer-funded $220 million upgrade of the base that includes new “water treatment plants, headquarters buildings, fuel farms, and power generating plants.” And what about the U.S. air base built at Balad, north of Baghdad, that now has 15 bus routes, two fire stations, two water treatment plants, two sewage treatment plants, two power plants, a water bottling plant, and the requisite set of fast-food outlets, PXes, and so on, as well as air traffic levels sometimes compared to those at Chicago’s O’Hare International?

What kind of American world are we living in when a plan to withdraw most U.S. troops from Iraq involves the removal of more than 1.5 million pieces of equipment? Or in which the possibility of withdrawal leads the Pentagon to issue nearly billion-dollar contracts (new ones!) to increase the number of private security contractors in that country?

What do you make of a world in which the U.S. has robot assassins in the skies over its war zones, 24/7, and the “pilots” who control them from thousands of miles away are ready on a moment’s notice to launch missiles — “Hellfire” missiles at that — into Pashtun peasant villages in the wild, mountainous borderlands of Pakistan and Afghanistan? What does it mean when American pilots can be at war “in” Afghanistan, 9 to 5, by remote control, while their bodies remain at a base outside Las Vegas and then can head home past a sign that warns them to drive carefully because this is “the most dangerous part of your day”?

What does it mean when, for our security and future safety, the Pentagon funds the wildest ideas imaginable for developing high-tech weapons systems, many of which sound as if they came straight out of the pages of sci-fi novels? Take, for example, Boeing’s advanced coordinated system of hand-held drones, robots, sensors, and other battlefield surveillance equipment slated for seven Army brigades within the next two years at a cost of $2 billion and for the full Army by 2025; or the Next Generation Bomber, an advanced “platform” slated for 2018; or a truly futuristic bomber, “a suborbital semi-spacecraft able to move at hypersonic speed along the edge of the atmosphere,” for 2035? What does it mean about our world when those people in our government peering deepest into a blue-skies future are planning ways to send armed “platforms” up into those skies and kill more than a quarter century from now?

And do you ever wonder about this: If such weaponry is being endlessly developed for our safety and security, and that of our children and grandchildren, why is it that one of our most successful businesses involves the sale of the same weaponry to other countries? Few Americans are comfortable thinking about this, which may explain why global-arms-trade pieces don’t tend to make it onto the front pages of our newspapers. Recently, the Times Pentagon correspondent Thom Shanker, for instance, wrote a piece on the subject which appeared inside the paper on a quiet Labor Day. “Despite Slump, U.S. Role as Top Arms Supplier Grows” was the headline. Perhaps Shanker, too, felt uncomfortable with his subject, because he included the following generic description: “In the highly competitive global arms market, nations vie for both profit and political influence through weapons sales, in particular to developing nations…” The figures he cited from a new congressional study of that “highly competitive” market told a different story: The U.S., with $37.8 billion in arms sales (up $12.4 billion from 2007), controlled 68.4% of the global arms market in 2008. Highly competitively speaking, Italy came “a distant second” with $3.7 billion. In sales to “developing nations,” the U.S. inked $29.6 billion in weapons agreements or 70.1% of the market. Russia was a vanishingly distant second at $3.3 billion or 7.8% of the market. In other words, with 70% of the market, the U.S. actually has what, in any other field, would qualify as a monopoly position — in this case, in things that go boom in the night. With the American car industry in a ditch, it seems that this (along with Hollywood films that go boom in the night) is what we now do best, as befits a war, if not warrior, state. Is that an American accomplishment you’re comfortable with?

On the day I’m writing this piece, “Names of the Dead,” a feature which appears almost daily in my hometown newspaper, records the death of an Army private from DeKalb, Illinois, in Afghanistan. Among the spare facts offered: he was 20 years old, which means he was probably born not long before the First Gulf War was launched in 1990 by President George H.W. Bush. If you include that war, which never really ended — low-level U.S. military actions against Saddam Hussein’s regime continued until the invasion of 2003 — as well as U.S. actions in the former Yugoslavia and Somalia, not to speak of the steady warfare underway since November 2001, in his short life, there was hardly a moment in which the U.S. wasn’t engaged in military operations somewhere on the planet (invariably thousands of miles from home). If that private left a one-year-old baby behind in the States, and you believe the statements of various military officials, that child could pass her tenth birthday before the war in which her father died comes to an end. Given the record of these last years, and the present military talk about being better prepared for “the next war,” she could reach 2025, the age when she, too, might join the military without ever spending a warless day. Is that the future you had in mind?

Consider this: War is now the American way, even if peace is what most Americans experience while their proxies fight in distant lands. Any serious alternative to war, which means our “security,” is increasingly inconceivable. In Orwellian terms then, war is indeed peace in the United States and peace, war.

American Newspeak

Newspeak, as Orwell imagined it, was an ever more constricted form of English that would, sooner or later, make “all other modes of thought impossible. It was intended,” he wrote in an appendix to his novel, “that when Newspeak had been adopted once and for all and Oldspeak forgotten, a heretical thought… should be literally unthinkable.”

When it comes to war (and peace), we live in a world of American Newspeak in which alternatives to a state of war are not only ever more unacceptable, but ever harder to imagine. If war is now our permanent situation, in good Orwellian fashion it has also been sundered from a set of words that once accompanied it.

It lacks, for instance, “victory.” After all, when was the last time the U.S. actually won a war (unless you include our “victories” over small countries incapable of defending themselves like the tiny Caribbean Island of Grenada in 1983 or powerless Panama in 1989)? The smashing “victory” over Saddam Hussein in the First Gulf War only led to a stop-and-start conflict now almost two decades old that has proved a catastrophe. Keep heading backward through the Vietnam and Korean Wars and the last time the U.S. military was truly victorious was in 1945.

But achieving victory no longer seems to matter. War American-style is now conceptually unending, as are preparations for it. When George W. Bush proclaimed a Global War on Terror (aka World War IV), conceived as a “generational struggle” like the Cold War, he caught a certain American reality. In a sense, the ongoing war system can’t absorb victory. Any such endpoint might indeed prove to be a kind of defeat.

No longer has war anything to do with the taking of territory either, or even with direct conquest. War is increasingly a state of being, not a process with a beginning, an end, and an actual geography.

Similarly drained of its traditional meaning has been the word “security” — though it has moved from a state of being (secure) to an eternal, immensely profitable process whose endpoint is unachievable. If we ever decided we were either secure enough, or more willing to live without the unreachable idea of total security, the American way of war and the national security state would lose much of their meaning. In other words, in our world, security is insecurity.

As for “peace,” war’s companion and theoretical opposite, though still used in official speeches, it, too, has been emptied of meaning and all but discredited. Appropriately enough, diplomacy, that part of government which classically would have been associated with peace, or at least with the pursuit of the goals of war by other means, has been dwarfed by, subordinated to, or even subsumed by the Pentagon. In recent years, the U.S. military with its vast funds has taken over, or encroached upon, a range of activities that once would have been left to an underfunded State Department, especially humanitarian aid operations, foreign aid, and what’s now called nation-building. (On this subject, check out Stephen Glain’s recent essay, “The American Leviathan” in the Nation magazine.)

Diplomacy itself has been militarized and, like our country, is now hidden behind massive fortifications, and has been placed under Lord-of-the-Flies-style guard. The State Department’s embassies are now bunkers and military-style headquarters for the prosecution of war policies; its officials, when enough of them can be found, are now sent out into the provinces in war zones to do “civilian” things.

And peace itself? Simply put, there’s no money in it. Of the nearly trillion dollars the U.S. invests in war and war-related activities, nothing goes to peace. No money, no effort, no thought. The very idea that there might be peaceful alternatives to endless war is so discredited that it’s left to utopians, bleeding hearts, and feathered doves. As in Orwell’s Newspeak, while “peace” remains with us, it’s largely been shorn of its possibilities. No longer the opposite of war, it’s just a rhetorical flourish embedded, like one of our reporters, in Warspeak.

What a world might be like in which we began not just to withdraw our troops from one war to fight another, but to seriously scale down the American global mission, close those hundreds of bases — recently, there were almost 300 of them, macro to micro, in Iraq alone — and bring our military home is beyond imagining. To discuss such obviously absurd possibilities makes you an apostate to America’s true religion and addiction, which is force. However much it might seem that most of us are peaceably watching our TV sets or computer screens or iPhones, we Americans are also — always — marching as to war. We may not all bother to attend the church of our new religion, but we all tithe. We all partake. In this sense, we live peaceably in a state of war.

*********

Tom Engelhardt, co-founder of the American Empire Project, runs the Nation Institute’s TomDispatch.com. He is the author of The End of Victory Culture, a history of the Cold War and beyond, as well as of a novel, The Last Days of Publishing. He also edited The World According to TomDispatch: America in the New Age of Empire (Verso, 2008), an alternative history of the mad Bush years.

Copyright 2009 Tom Engelhardt

September 18th, 2009

Physicians for Human Rights — Israel: Torture in Israel and Physicians’ Involvement in Torture

Physicians for Human Rights — Israel has issued a new position paper:  Torture in Israel and Physicians’ Involvement in Torture [pdf].  Here is their announcement:

To the members and volunteers of Physicians for Human Rights-Israel

Over the past year, PHR-Israel has held extensive correspondence with the Ministry of Health and the Israeli Medical Association (IMA) on the subject of the roles and responsibilities of doctors regarding the interrogation of detainees in general and interrogations involving torture in particular. As will be made clear in the attached Position Paper, PHR-Israel calls for the removal of doctors from facilities in which torture is employed, in order to protect them from breaches of medical ethics, and seeks to increase the awareness of medical communities regarding this issue.

As detailed in the Position Paper, the leadership of the medical community in Israel did not in the past take a clear enough stand against torture, and only a ruling by the High Court of Justice provided a clear prohibition on torture. Our current correspondence with IMA and the Ministry of Health suggests that the medical leadership in Israel is still not acting in a determined way against torture, as required by the principles of medical ethics. The Position Paper aims to provide a response to the majority of questions that may arise on this issue, such as: Why are doctors obliged to follow the rules of medical ethics? What are we demanding of IMA and the Ministry of Health (and what is their position on this issue)? and What is the role of international bodies in this struggle?.

Doctors are in danger of transgressing their ethical responsibilities, often because of they lack awareness of the issues at hand. For this reason, PHR-Israel has published a short Handbook explaining the ethical responsibilities of doctors in such cases, and detailing the most common injuries of victims of torture and/or violence, in order to improve the chances that when a doctor encounters a victim of torture, he or she will identify the evidence and will be able to provide the victim with assistance and protection.

We appeal to you, members and volunteers of our organization, to play an active part in the struggle against torture and against the involvement of doctors in torture. We ask all members and volunteers of PHR-Israel to act for change in Israel in all matters related to torture, and to help us by distributing the Handbook and the Position Paper among your colleagues in the medical community. Only your public support can help those doctors who are working within systems with high risk for dual loyalty.

We believe that raising awareness of this issue is an essential stage in the struggle against torture in Israel.

Please distribute this email as widely as possible.

And here is the Summary from the report:

• PHR-Israel reiterates its sweeping opposition to all forms of torture that continue to be carried out in Israel, regardless of their rationalization. In a speech he gave to the Bar Association, Justice Aharon Barak said that in the past the heads of the security authorities would thank him for the intervention of the High Court of Justice (HCJ) in matters of security. “The head of the General Security Services said ‘thank you’ after a ruling declared that it was prohibited to use torture against detainees. We reached the conclusion that when you use your head and not your
hands, the results are better.” 1 Despite the ruling a decade ago by the HCJ prohibiting torture of prisoners and detainees except under very specific circumstances, torture continues to be practiced in Israel’s interrogation facilities. Most cases of torture are not investigated, and interrogators are typically authorized in advance to use torture or other inhumane or degrading methods. These practices are illegal, contradicting Israeli and international law.

• PHR-Israel calls upon physicians to immediately and completely cease their participation in torture, and to fulfill their duty to report all cases of torture or suspected torture that have come to their knowledge. Physicians participate in interrogation procedures that involve torture by examining interrogated persons
before, during and after interrogation, and failing to report cases of torture that have been revealed to them. Such participation in torture stands in stark opposition to international conventions to which Israel is a signatory and to the rules of medical ethics that apply to physicians, and may make physicians who participate in torture legally accountable. Physicians’ refusal to participate in torture may undermine the
legitimacy of those who practice it, and may contribute to ending torture.

• PHR-Israel calls upon the Israel Medical Association (IMA) to utilize its status appropriately to lead the Israeli medical community in the struggle against torture. The IMA must put an end to years of turning a blind eye to torture and physicians’
involvement in it. It must seriously investigate complaints it receives on this issue, and take steps to remove physicians who provide services to GSS interrogation facilities from those posts. At the same time, the IMA must publicly provide legal and financial support to physicians who testify regarding torture.

• PHR-Israel calls upon the Ministry of Health to a) reformulate its position such that it is clear that physicians are not only prohibited from participating in illegal activity, but are also prohibited from participating in torture, even if it has been authorized by the Attorney General and/or the Head of the GSS; and b) change its position – that torture is a rare occurrence, if it happens at all, and thus does not justify guidelines – and to issue clear guidelines on torture, in accordance with the rules of medical ethics and international law.

Finally, also look at their fact sheet: Medical Teams: Prevent Torture.

August 3rd, 2009