Psyche, Science, and Society

McCain finds mass killing funny

McCain appears to have fine qualifications to be US President. He can joke about the mass murder of others:

McCain jokes about killing Iranians with cigarettes

U.S. Republican presidential candidate John McCain, who once sang in jest about bombing Iran, on Tuesday reacted to a report of rising U.S. cigarette exports to the country by saying it may be “a way of killing ‘em.”

McCain, known for acerbic comments and for sometimes firing verbally from the hip, was responding to a report that U.S. exports to Iran rose tenfold during President George W. Bush’s term in office despite hostility between the two states.

A rise in cigarette sales was a big part of that, according to an Associated Press analysis of seven years of U.S. trade figures.

“Maybe that’s a way of killing ‘em,” McCain said to reporters during a campaign stop in Pittsburgh. “I meant that as a joke, as a person who hasn’t had a cigarette in 28 years, 29 years,” he added, laughing.

He declined further comment on the report.

At a campaign meeting in South Carolina last year the Arizona senator, asked if there is a plan to attack Iran, began his answer with a variation on the lyrics of a well-known pop song, Barbara Ann.

“You know that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran?” he said, then sang “Bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran” before discussing what he considered Iran’s serious threat to Israel and international security.

Tension is high between the two countries over Iran’s nuclear program, which Washington says is aimed at making an atomic bomb but Tehran says is for generating energy. There has been media speculation of a possible U.S. or Israeli military strike against Iran’s nuclear facilities.

Add comment July 9th, 2008

Boston Globe takes on Hillary Clinton, Obliterator-in-Chief

One of the most ridiculous and yet terrifying statements yet during this campaign came this week from Hillary Clinton, who has given up her race for the President and has announced a campaign for Obliterator-in-Chief. She told ABC News that, in response to being asked her response if Iran attacked Israel with nuclear weapons.

“I want the Iranians to know that if I’m the president, we will attack Iran…. In the next 10 years, during which they might foolishly consider launching an attack on Israel, we would be able to totally obliterate them.”
[See complete editorial below.]

Thus, Clinton has announced her willingness, if elected, to incinerate 60 million innocents. Such a staetment makes her defeat a necessity for anyone concerned with human decency.

The Boston Globe has responded appropriately in an editorial to that campaign. To cut to the chase, the Globe states, echoing my horrified reaction:

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

Remember that during the rest of the campaign.

Sandy Levinson at Balkinization also has two excellent posts on Clinton’s disgusting comments: As we prepare to elect our next constitutional dictator and Torture and “obliteration”.

In the first, Levinson points out:

This is the statement of someone running for constitutional dictatorship, not for a “republican form of government” presidency who might have said, for example, “as President, I will certainly urge the Congress to declare war on Iran should Iran attack Israel”–though one might wonder exactly why, since the brutal truth is that an attack on Israel, however egregious, would not constitute a serious security threat to the United States (which is why Israel very wisely has constructed its own nuclear deterrent instead of relying on the US and the vagaries of American domestic politics)–”though I recognize that that decision is ultimately for Congress to make.”

In the second post Levinson relates our insistence that candidates renounce torture with our ability to accept their willingness to support obliterating millions:

There is a widespread consensus, shared, at least rhetorically, by the Bush Administration itself, that “torture” is forbidden and indefensible. That is precisely why so much of the debate concerns what, precisely, counts as torture. (For the record, let me state that I regard waterboarding, as well as extended sleep deprivation and much else, as torture.) But, of course, there is also the additional debate, sparked by the Yoo memorandum, as to whether the President, under extreme conditions, has the authority to order torture.

But why isn’t there more debate, not only among academics but among the general public, about a) the morality of any military strategy that depends on “obliterating” millions of innocent people simply because they have the bad luck to be living in a country run by terrible leaders and b) the propriety of a view of presidential power that makes it possible for an ostensibly serious candidate for our nation’s highest office so casually to threaten such obliteration should another country engage in behavior that, though no immediate threat to American security, we deem sufficiently awful? As awful as torture is, it really isn’t the most awful thing that regularly occurs in the world, starting with “collateral damage” to innocent civilians as the result of “justified” military attacks, and going onward to the “destruction” that is at the basis of nuclear deterrence strategy (under the rubric “Mutually Assured Destruction”).

Here is the complete Globe editorial:

Hillary Strangelove

AMERICANS have learned to take with a grain of salt much of the rhetoric in a campaign like the current Democratic donnybrook between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama. Still, there are some red lines that should never be crossed. Clinton did so Tuesday morning, the day of the Pennsylvania primary, when she told ABC’s “Good Morning America” that, if she were president, she would “totally obliterate” Iran if Iran attacked Israel.

This foolish and dangerous threat was muted in domestic media coverage. But it reverberated in headlines around the world.

Responding with understatement to a question in the British House of Lords, the foreign minister responsible for Asia, Lord Mark Malloch-Brown, said of Clinton’s implication of a mushroom cloud over Iran: “While it is reasonable to warn Iran of the consequences of it continuing to develop nuclear weapons and what those real consequences bring to its security, it is probably not prudent in today’s world to threaten to obliterate any other country and in many cases civilians resident in such a country.”

A less restrained reaction came from an editorial in the Saudi-based paper Arab News. Being neighbors of Iran, the Saudis and the other Gulf Arabs have the most to fear from Iran’s nuclear program and its drive to become the dominant power in the Gulf.

But precisely because they are most at risk from Iran’s regional ambitions, the Saudis want a carefully considered American approach to Iran, one that balances firmness and diplomatic engagement.

The Saudi paper called Clinton’s nuclear threat “the foreign politics of the madhouse,” saying, “it demonstrates the same doltish ignorance that has distinguished Bush’s foreign relations.”

The Saudis are not always sound advisers on American foreign policy. But they understand that Rambo rhetoric like Clinton’s only plays into the hands of Iranian hard-liners who want to plow ahead with efforts to attain a nuclear weapons capability. They argue that Iran must have that capability in order to deter the United States from doing what Clinton threatened to do.

While Clinton has hammered Obama for supporting military strikes in Pakistan, her comments on Iran are much more far-reaching. She seems not to realize that she undermined Iranian reformists and pragmatists. The Iranian people have been more favorable to America than any other in the Gulf region or the Middle East.

A presidential candidate who lightly commits to obliterating Iran - and, presumably, all the children, parents, and grandparents in Iran - should not be answering the White House phone at any time of day or night.

Add comment April 27th, 2008

Bennis: Iraqi Government Fails in Challenging al Sadr Militia

Phyllis Bennis provides further analysis of the current intra-Shia Iraq conflict:

Iraqi Government Fails in Challenging al Sadr Militia: “Surge” Exposed as Failure But New Dangers Rise

By Phyllis Bennis
Institute for Policy Studies
30 March 2008

** The Iraqi government’s military offensive in Basra was designed to undermine Prime Minister al-Maliki’s major Shi’a political rival, Moktada al Sadr, but the offensive appears to have failed, and instead is strengthening Sadr’s forces and significantly weakening Bush administration strategy in Iraq.

** The inability of Iraqi government forces to defeat or even halt Sadr’s militia in Basra, Baghdad or elsewhere even with massive U.S. military support, and the resulting escalation of overall violence in Iraq, also proves the failure of the so-called “surge.”

** This power struggle between Maliki and Sadr is important because it represents Iraq’s linchpin fight between supporters and opponents of the U.S. occupation and the government kept in place by the occupation; it is particularly important in Basra because almost all of Iraq’s oil these days is exported through Basra.

** The current fighting escalates the danger of a U.S. attack on Iran, because the undeniable failure of the “surge” strategy makes it much harder for the Bush administration to continue claiming “victory” in Iraq.

*****

The Iraqi government’s U.S.-backed offensive that began on March 25 was not designed to go after “criminals” and was not limited to Basra. It was designed to eliminate the military and political power of Shi’a cleric Moqtada al Sadr, Maliki’s most powerful Shi’a rival, ahead of the provincial elections set for October. The U.S. knew about the planned attacks long ago, and has played a major role in the fighting; Britain has played some role as well. Large-scale desertions among government troops, especially in Baghdad, have been reported. Despite a curfew imposed on Baghdad, huge protests against the offensive broke out in the streets of the Sadr City neighborhood of Baghdad. Direct U.S. involvement - including attacks by helicopter gunships (killing 78 “bad guys” on one day in Basra alone, according to the Pentagon), coordinating attacks and calling in air support - was acknowledged on the 28^th. But that support has been insufficient, and the U.S.- and UK-trained Iraqi government troops are still losing against Sadr’s forces. With Maliki having to be evacuated under fire from the Basra palace where he was “directing” the offensive, and the Iraqi government forces collapsing before the stronger Sadr forces, it is clear Maliki miscalculated his own capacity. As the BBC reported it, “Maliki binked first.”

Instead of strengthening the unpopular Maliki government, the offensive provides a very different “defining moment” than that Bush claimed. It showed that Maliki could not take on the Sadr forces either in Basra, or in Baghdad or a host of cities surrounding Baghdad. And Sadr’s decision on Sunday to call on his forces to stand down, thus reinstituting the ceasefire that he ordered last year but which had collapsed in the face of the Maliki-U.S. offensive, demonstrated once again that the recent decline in violence rested very much in Sadr’s hands. It wasn’t primarily the “surge” that brought about the dramatic decrease in violence from late spring of 2007 till about last November, but rather Sadr’s ceasefire - a choice that could, as recent actions show, be reversed at any time. Sadr’s very public demonstration of his power to unleash or rein in his military forces may well provide a new kind of “defining moment” indeed.

The surge was never the primary reason for the decline in violence. The combination of factors included Sadr’s ceasefire, the creation and paying off of the U.S.-backed and largely Sunni “awakening councils” (who are now accepting money not to attack occupation troops, but who could, like Sadr’s forces, reverse that decision at any point they choose), and finally the horrifying “success” of the ethnic cleansing that was the goal of so much of the violence. Especially in mixed areas such as most of Baghdad, the escalating sectarian violence of 2005-2006 into 2007 largely aimed to force people out of their heterogeneous neighborhoods and into separate Sunni or Shi’a communities. That has largely been accomplished, with much of Baghdad’s population (those who haven’t fled altogether…) now having been forcibly herded into walled-off enclaves kept separate by armed sectarian militias. So the raison d’être of the brutal violence that created that new sectarian reality has ended.

The recent offensive by Maliki’s Shi’a-dominated government troops against their Shi’a rivals was not just one more example of jockeying for power or influence within the Shi’a community. Political fighting has been going on within and among Shi’a communities including both sectarian organizations and Shi’a components of secular or national forces, since the U.S. invasion. This offensive was a specific effort to use the power of the U.S.-trained, U.S.-armed Iraqi army to destroy Moqtada al Sadr’s militia, and thus undermine his political power, once and for all. That effort has failed.

There is particular significance, beyond demonstrating the weakness and unpopularity of the Maliki government even among fellow Shi’a, of the failure of this offensive. One is that a majority of Iraq’s exported oil today is sent from Basra into the Persian Gulf and out into the world. With Maliki’s influence collapsing and Sadr consolidating his hold on Basra, control of oil and the revenue it brings will be much more difficult for the weakened Maliki government. Second, Sadr represents one of the most powerful voices in Iraq against the occupation. It is that political choice - between support for and opposition to the U.S. occupation - that is at stake in this fight. A clear victory by Sadr’s forces - even if the offensive ends with the reinstatement of the cease-fire at Sadr’s own choosing - will strengthen the national mobilization against the U.S. occupation and the Maliki government that it props up.

The current offensive also holds significant dangers in the region. The Bush administration moved early in the offensive to declare it a “defining moment.” General Petraeus is scheduled to come to Washington on April 8 -9, to brief Bush and to reassure congress and the people that “the surge” is working. But in the face of an incontrovertible failure of Maliki’s surge-backed army, that will not be easy. If they had waited, they might have chosen to respond to Maliki’s failure by attempting to diminish the significance of the offensive overall. But having already staked out a position on its importance, the consequences of the offensive’s failure for Bush’s position could be dire. U.S. desperation is evident in the words of Lt. Col. Steve Stover, military spokesman in Baghdad. Describing the 78 unidentified Iraqi “bad guys” the U.S. admitted killing in Basra, where they probably lived, the occupation forces’ mouthpiece said, “They are violating the rule of law. They are firing rockets indiscriminately. They are criminals and terrorists, and they deserve to die.”

There is a rising danger that ideologues in the White House, driven by unilateralism and militarism as points of principle and led by Dick Cheney, could use this moment to escalate or even implement military threats towards Iran - hoping to thereby distract Americans from their failing Iraq policy. Condoleezza Rice is in the Middle East, ostensibly talking to Israeli and Palestinian leaders about the so-called “peace process.” She may have another agenda as well; Cheney’s regional “peace process” visit last week primarily focused on pressing Arab governments to back U.S. threats against Iran. (In fact the day after Cheney left Riyadh, the Saudi and Arab Gulf press announced that the Saudi government’s powerful Shura council would “secretly discuss national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors.” Even if that report is factually false, its deliberate announcement in the government-controlled press indicates unease among Bush’s top Arab allies.) We should be watching for any deliberate provocation aimed at Iran, or even a completely false Tonkin Gulf-style “incident” which might be designed as a pretext to military strikes against Iran.

1 comment March 31st, 2008

Kinane: War on Iran

Antiwar activists Ed Kinane sends this piece on a potential US invasion of Iran:

Invading Iran
Ed Kinane

Men keep going to war. They go for many reasons. The only defensible reason, however, is self-defense - of one’s family, one’s community, one’s country.

With war many suffer and suffer profoundly. But few gain. Why then do men go to war so often? In one way or another most soldiers are coerced or brainwashed into battle.

The few who gain keep the pot boiling. Only they have the power to do so. Even as they themselves avoid battle, those few force others to kill and risk death.

Many are the reasons for not going to war. To begin with, just count the victims.

Years ago a group of anti-war activists here in Syracuse brainstormed reasons to oppose the imminent US attack on Iraq. Not much tweaking would be needed for that long list to apply equally to a US invasion of Iran.

That tweaking would be no academic exercise. Mr. Cheney and Mr. Bush, having despoiled two Islamic nations, are poised to despoil a third.

What follows draws on our brainstorm of years ago. As we did then, we begin here with why people of conscience must oppose war in general:

~ war breeds war. War is contagious. Violence breeds violence. “Violence bounces” (e.e. cummings). War unleashes reactive terrorism, retaliatory terrorism. War is terrorism.

~ war is about killing. Killing is immoral. Killing violates conscience. It violates virtually every spiritual heritage. That the killing is at a distance or from a high altitude, or that it is multiple, doesn’t absolve it.

~ in war soldiers lose not only their limbs but their lives. They lose not only their psyches but their souls. Thanks to propaganda and misrepresentation, soldiers are put in harrowing circumstances no human should have to endure. To avoid killing or for the shame of having killed, some commit suicide.

~ war corrupts. Wars of aggression corrupt absolutely. In war, profiteering is rife. Our taxes finance war while the corporations cash in. The profiteers both promote and perpetuate war.

~ war demands censorship. War demands disinformation. The first casualty of war is truth. War stifles dissent and erodes civil liberties. Benito Mussolini told us fascism is the merger of the corporations with the government. War cloaks and consolidates fascism.

~ the US is the unopposed master of aerial warfare. Air war doesn’t discriminate between civilian and military. It targets and destroys infrastructure essential to civilian life. For the past century civilians have been the vast majority of war casualties. Killing civilians is cowardly. It is terrorism.

~ war spreads, surges, spills over, escalates. It ignores borders, ignores limits. War trickles down; it comes home to roost. War cheapens and brutalizes a people and their culture. Domestic abuse rises as soldiers - many suffering post-traumatic stress disorder — return home.

~ pre-emptive war violates national sovereignty. Pre-emptive war violates the UN Charter and international law. Violations of law - especially by the only superpower - undermine global security.

~ financing war becomes a pretext to scale back social programs essential for the quality of life, essential for distributive justice, essential for real democracy. War, especially repeated war, bankrupts. For better or worse it overextends and implodes empire.

~ the US now uses depleted uranium in its armor and ordnance. Upon returning home many soldiers, exposed to toxic and radioactive d.u., fall ill. Some conceive babies congenitally deformed. In Iraq depleted uranium leads to epidemic childhood leukemia.

~ war pollutes and otherwise subverts the environment. War squanders the earth’s resources.

War on Iran

In 1953 a CIA coup toppled the democratically elected statesman, Mohammad Mossadegh. The CIA then installed the Shah, a tyrant and friend to US oil companies. In 1979 a popular revolution overthrew the Shah.

Iran, a cradle of civilization, has twelve next-door neighbors. In the past two centuries it hasn’t invaded any of them. Needless to say it has never invaded the US… or toppled any US president. Nor has Iran looted US oil.

Iran has never provided any credible threat to US security. Yet Bush Inc. keeps saber rattling, brazenly threatening to attack Iran. The folly and viciousness of such provocation is clear:

~ since 1979 diplomacy between the US and Iran has barely been pursued.

~ war against Iran is a neo-con dream. It’s about controlling the oil faucet. It’s about bending the Middle East to US imperial will. It’s about world domination.

~ despite the hype, despite the lies, a war on Iran would be one of naked, Nazi-like aggression. Israel and AIPAC, its US lobby, incite hostility to Iran, distorting a realistic assessment of our interests in the Middle East.

~ war is unpredictable. The contemplated air war may morph into land war: thousands of US soldiers may die; hundreds of thousands of Iranians may die. Millions may be displaced.

~ war on Iran risks drying up Iranian oil on world markets. If an attacked Iran succeeds in blocking the Strait of Hormuz, other Middle East oil will cease to flow. Oil companies may profit from the scarce supply, but prices at the pump will spike.

~ a US invasion co-opts the choices of the Iranian people. It would undermine those progressive Iranians struggling for reform.

~ Muslims are a quarter of the world’s population. They may grow impatient with the US attacking yet another Islamic country. US soldiers in Iraq will reap the blowback of Shia rage.

~ yet another invasion may undermine US ties with its allies as the US further proves itself a global outlaw, a rogue state.

~ like the invasion of Afghanistan and Iraq, the invasion of Iran would be a war of distraction. That distraction might temporarily obscure those two failed wars and the deepening recession. Domestic opposition here to the war on Iran might somehow provide Bush and Cheney the pretext to suspend the 2008 presidential elections…thus postponing their indictment for war crime.

~ the US has no legal or moral standing to pre-emptively target Iran’s alleged nuclear capacity. The US is the world’s only perpetrator of nuclear holocaust - not once, but twice, not against military targets but against civilians. The US abetted the nuclearization of Israel.

Given its nuclear arsenal, its use of depleted uranium, its arms export industry, its support for the Israeli air war on Lebanon, and its own terrorist training camps (e.g. the US Army’s School of the Americas), it is sheer hypocrisy for the US to claim it is waging “war on terrorism.”Lastly: for five fierce years a battered and factionalized Iraq - without a national army or air force — has withstood and humbled the mighty US military. Iran is even larger, richer, more intact and more united than Iraq. As Iraq learned when it tried to invade Iran in the eighties, a righteous Iran is no foe to mess with.

Ed Kinane spent two weeks in Iran in 2007 with the Fellowship of Reconciliation and five months in Iraq in 2003 with Voices in the Wilderness. Reach him at edkinane@verizon.net.

Add comment March 22nd, 2008

Horton asks Darius Rejali six questions about torture

Darius Rejali is one of the most knowledgeable scholars on torture, a rather dubious distinction. I am currently slowly working my way through his encyclopedic Torture and Democracy, wherein he argues that international human rights monitoring and democracy have contributed to the development by states of so-called “clean tortures.” Clean tortures include SERE-style psychological torture, but also electric torture, waterboarding, beating the soles of the feet, and even tasers and the like.

Scott Horton poses six questions for Rejali. The interview bears reading several times as it contains much wisdom.

Six Questions for Darius Rejali, Author of ‘Torture and Democracy’

Reed College Professor Darius Rejali is one of the world’s leading thinkers and writers on the subject of torture and the consequences of its use for modern society. Princeton University Press has just published his magisterial study of torture and how it has developed as a social and moral issue with a focus on developments through the last century. Rejali tracks the question in many different settings and societies–from Athens in its golden age to the French colonial wars, totalitarian states in the mid-twentieth century, down to America in the Age of George W. Bush. I put six questions to Rejali about his book and its relevance to the current debate in the United States.

1. Your new book, ‘Torture and Democracy,’ reflects a lengthy engagement with the subject of torture as a phenomenon over a vast stretch of time and among many different societies. But in the preface, you start by relating something about your own background as an Iranian-American, trying to understand how torture was transforming Iran and complicating its evolution in modern times. Did developments in Iran lead you to this subject? In what ways do you think torture has affected the political culture of Iran and its extremely awkward relations with the rest of the world?

Most people think torture is a barbaric survivor and that it would disappear over time with progress. This is a mistake, and my experience growing up in Iran taught me that and led me to write Torture and Modernity: Self, State and Society in Iran (1994). I used Iran to show that while old ritualistic, public torture would disappear over time, other tortures would survive and new techniques would appear, let’s call these modern torture.

Prof. Darius Rejali

I remember one distinguished expert who reviewed my work said, basically, how can Rejali say torture is part of modernity? If that was true, America would torture too. It really was amazing, in retrospect, how willfully blind people wanted to be. I grew up in Iran at a time when the Shah’s secret police, the SAVAK, did not hesitate torturing Islamic and Marxist insurgents. No one thought torture was something incompatible with cars, fast food, washing machines and other parts of modern life. I remember talking to a high-ranking SAVAK officer years after the Shah was gone, and he certainly felt he played an important role in modernization. It wasn’t the last time I’ve heard torturers say how important they are in making their country safe for economic opportunity.

Another point: Everyone forgets that the Iranian revolution of 1978-1979 was the revolution against torture. When the Shah criticized Khomayni as a blackrobed Islamic medieval throwback, Khomayni replied, look who is talking, the man who tortures. This was powerful rhetoric for recruiting people, then as it is now. People joined the revolutionary opposition because of the Shah’s brutality, and they remembered who installed him. If anyone wants to know why Iranians hated the US so, all they have to do is ask what America’s role was in promoting torture in Iran. Torture not only shaped the revolution, it was the factor that has deeply poisoned the relationship of Iran with the West. So why trust the West again? And the Iranian leadership doesn’t.

2. One of the themes that circulates through your book is that we are mistaken in attaching torture only to non-democratic states; your special focus is on how democratic states use torture, and you give examples stretching from Athens in the golden age to America under George W. Bush, but with France in its waning colonial phase as perhaps the best illustration of them all. But isn’t it the case that modern democratic concepts rest on the rejection of torture? I think back to figures like Voltaire. When he describes torture in great detail and attacks its crudeness, its stupidity—as in his brilliant description of the cruel execution of the 19-year-old chevalier de La Barre—he seems to be making a political statement by it. This system, he says, does not value the worth of the individual human being, and indeed that is the essence of its tyranny. Conversely the post-Enlightenment democracies took rejection of torture as an element of their identity, as we saw in Washington’s orders, or as the first article of the German Grundgesetz, which states, “The dignity of the human being is inviolable. The respect and protection of that dignity is the obligation of all state power.” Leaving aside the differing concept of democracy in classical antiquity, do you not see a fundamental crisis of identity with a democratic state that adopts and uses torture?

Torture involves giving absolute power by one individual over another. Our founders knew that absolute power corrupts absolutely and that we shouldn’t even trust ourselves with absolute power. That is why they promoted limited government in politics, toleration of minorities in social life, and dignity in our relations with strangers. The history of slavery teaches us that this kind of power corrupts society, and history of torture shows how badly it damages states. Thomas Hobbes, whose national security credentials are impeccable, says it quite clearly in The Leviathan: “Accusations upon torture, are not to be reputed as testimonies” for what each prisoner confesses “tendeth to the ease of him that is tortured, not to the informing of the torturers.” People will say anything under torture to ease pain, says Hobbes, and this as far as he concerned, corrupted the judicial process and made all of us unsafe.

Torture may be compatible with democracy, but it is not compatible with liberalism, and we live in liberal democracies today. What I document in Torture and Democracy, is how modern liberal democratic states try to get around violating the dignity of others by becoming hypocrites. To this end, they use a lot of techniques that are physically painful, but don’t leave marks. A prisoner who doesn’t have marks is simply not credible when he makes the accusation of torture. So now they can say, “There was no torture see? So go home now.” Instead of embracing the ideals of dignity and freedom, states become cleverer in methods of oppression and deception. As John Locke said brilliantly in his Letter Concerning Toleration, a state that tortures is always a state of hypocrites. I also document how authoritarian states became cleaner in their torture as liberalism developed into a worldwide human rights movement after World War II. These dictators, especially our allies, realized their legitimacy and foreign aid, depended on being clean. Hypocrisy isn’t just a monopoly of democratic states.

The good news here is that liberal democratic leaders actually care enough about legitimacy that they fear clear outrages will cause people, the voters, to do something about it. If they didn’t, scarring tortures would still be common. So when we watch them, they get sneaky. Could things get worse? Sure. Locke believed that history was committed to liberalism’s triumph, but the question today is whether history will even tolerate liberalism surviving into the twenty second century. Everywhere, blind nationalism seems to threaten liberalism. Documenting clean torture in this respect is like the canary in the coal mine. As long as torture remains clean—and so far it has—it means that government leaders know that people are watching, and I find that hopeful.

3. In America today, the debate seems to focus on the efficacy of torture—whether it is a useful tool for getting at the truth. You note the flow from the Roman Ulpian, who accepts torture as something quite normal to be used in interrogation (though he does at some points express skepticism about its usefulness) to Cesare Beccaria, whose monumental denunciation of torture did so much to influence European ideas about torture and criminal justice in the eighteenth century. But today we seem stuck in a debate in which those who use torture are eager to try to justify themselves but unwilling to let a bright light shine into their conduct, ostensibly for national security reasons, though many will inevitably suspect that secrecy is driven by concerns for their own culpability. You offer up a very lengthy and nuanced discussion on the efficacy of torture, and in your Washington Post column on five myths you have pulled some chestnuts out of it. One of them is that “people will say anything under torture.” But isn’t the claim rather the way Shakespeare put it in act III of the ‘Merchant of Venice,’ that people will say what they think the torturer wants them to say? And doesn’t that explain why societies that put a premium on confessions like torture to extract them, and why al-Libi told the CIA about Saddam Hussein’s non-existent WMD plans? Don’t you think that the efficacy discussion has to address the broader consequences that a decision to use torture has to reputation, and conversely to the ability of a terrorist foe to recruit?

Yes, I do. During the Islamic Revolution in Iran, the Shah’s torture was the best recruiting tool the opposition had. Prisons were places where prisoners met each other and professionalized their skills, as I and others have documented. It feels like a nightmare watching American politicians make the same mistake as the Shah. I like to believe that with every mistake we must surely be learning, but sometimes it is hard to believe.

When I talked about people under torture saying anything, I was especially interested in the cases where torturers interrogate for true information. That’s what I document doesn’t work. But it seems pretty clear that torture works to generate false confessions, which serve equally as well as true confessions for many state purposes. When judges and juries value confessions as decisive proof, police are happy to generate confessions for convictions. This can happen in domestic crime, as it happened in Chicago in the 1980s where African Americans were sentenced to death on the basis of coerced confessions. They’re also good for international show trials, trials that exonerate the state’s failures. Stalin wanted show trials to demonstrate that terrorists and saboteurs caused his failures, and he wasn’t the last leader who liked show trials to vindicate his decisions. And lastly, states use false confessions as blackmail to turn prisoners into unwilling informants. Torture allows one to collect dependent and insular individuals, spreading a net of fear across a population. This can happen locally (as in a ghetto) or in a whole state, like East Germany.

It’s also true that torturers often hear what they want to hear. In fact that’s one of the big problems with torture that I document in the book and the “Five Myths” article. Even if torture could actually break a person and they told you the truth, the torturer has to recognize it was the truth, and too often that doesn’t happen because torturers come into a situation with their own assumptions and don’t believe the victim. Moreover, intelligence gathering is especially vulnerable to deception. In police work, the crime is already known; all one wants is the confession. In intelligence, one must gather information about things that one does not know.

And let’s remember, torturers aren’t chosen for intelligence; they are chosen for devotion and loyalty, and they are terrible at spotting the truth when they see it. In the “Five Myths” piece I talk about how the Chilean secret service lost valuable information in that way when they broke Sheila Cassidy, an English doctor, and she told them everything but they didn’t believe her. And one can just repeat dozens of stories like this. My favorite is when Senator John McCain tried to explain the concept of Easter to his North Vietnamese torturer. “We believe there was a guy who walked the earth, did great things, was killed and three days later, he rose from the dead and went up to heaven.” His interrogator was puzzled and asked him to explain it again and again. He left, and when he came back, he was angry and threatened to beat him. Americans couldn’t possibly believe in “Easter” since no one lives again; McCain had to be making this up.

4. You talk about a “national security model” for torture and discuss in particular the way the French adopted torture to use in the Algerian war and how they reconciled this with a legal regime which condemned torture. I was most taken by the discussion of the judicial aspect. Allegations of torture, you report, were referred to a specific examining magistrate, Jacques Batigne, who served as a dead-letter office. You also point how the democratic process failed to engage this, in part because the leftist opposition was so badly discredited with its own Stalinist torture baggage. The analysis you present seems to me to closely parallel what Albert Camus writes in his diary, the ‘Chroniques algériennes,’ in which he dwells very heavily on torture and how it corrupted France’s democratic process. In America today, the Bush Administration seems to have developed its own repertoire of legal tricks. Judges refuse to consider torture cases by noting that immunity of public officials precludes them, or state secrets, or some combination of the two. And we recently saw Michael Mukasey tell us that because opinions had been given by the Office of Legal Counsel which declared torture techniques lawful, the use of those techniques could not be criminally investigated. It seems very close to the French approach. But assuming the political process produces a change to an anti-torture political leadership, what are the prospects for a democratic society going back and holding torturers to account? Have you given that any systematic study?

Stopping torture is actually the easiest part; the harder part is undoing the long-term damage. To stop torture, all one really needs is clear leadership that spells clear rules and punishes the slightest violations of the rules. It also protects whistleblowers, and requires regular and open medical inspection, not to mention fair and open trials for all prisoners. This was the way we stopped most torture in the US in the 1940s and 1950s after three or four decades of abysmal police torture in America, in cities both large and small.

Torture casts a very long shadow. When a state tortures, many decent professionals retire, leaving the police forces, the military and the intelligence services in disgust. So those who stayed behind create a culture of impunity. Torture also has a powerful deprofessionalizing ethic, damaging other intelligence efforts. Why do the hard work of using proper police and interrogation techniques when you’ve got a bat?. Considering that most recent whistleblowers have had to hide in fear, including the man who revealed the Abu Ghraib tortures, it will be difficult to recruit good people to do this work. How can you prevent waste or fraud, much less torture, if you are not going to protect whistleblowers? You can’t.

Americans think in the fantasy terms of Jack Bauer and ticking time bombs, while our hospitals fill with soldiers who clearly are suffering the traumatic side effects of being involved in torture, what is now called “perpetrator induced traumatic stress.” Americans seem less willing to acknowledge what our nation asked them to do than fund what is needed for their recovery. Fifty years after the Algerian War, the French have thousands of soldiers in therapy including their DOPS interrogators who are described as “spiritually wounded men, often ravaged by the weight of their guilt and shame.” We have yet to acknowledge that, much less the damage to victims and innocents we tortured.

A lot of people want trials, not just trials for those who did terrible things but also trials for those who had command responsibility and should have, and could have, prevented torture. And nothing predicts future torture quite like past impunity. But trials are an imperfect solution. They can deeply divide a society. The Argentine government tried the generals, but when it tried notorious junior officers responsible for torture, it faced a series of rebellions. And we certainly need to have a final open accounting of what was done, but truth commissions also have a mixed history, sometimes helping and other times promoting amnesia.

I would like to think that changing leaders will make a difference. But then remember, I lived through a revolution where the most important thing was to throw out the Shah and stop torture. The irony is that it didn’t stop. Changing leaders doesn’t automatically change torture. In fact, states usually change their interrogation practices after wars, not during them or when leaders change. This is what happened in Iran. People are too scared in wars and uncertain in crises, so they repeatedly reach for the same techniques that the people they opposed used.

But having said that, it is possible to change course in mid-war successfully. As I show in Torture and Democracy, the Battle of Algiers turned in favor of the French only after Paul Aussaresses, who ran the torture policy, was replaced by the very smart and canny Col. Yves Godard, and it was his informants, not Aussaresses’ torture policy, that gave the French the big breaks they needed. Goddard knew how intelligence really worked.

So it can be done. And whoever does it is going to have the backing of the American people. Every scientific national poll I’ve looked at since 9/11, for example, shows consistently anti-torture majorities in America. This number hasn’t varied, always hovering between 55 to 65% opposition, and includes both Republicans and Democrats. When pollsters ask not about “torture” in general but specific techniques like waterboarding, the opposition spikes to 80% opposed even if there is a ticking time bomb. What best predicts whether you’re for torture turns out not to be a partisan issue, though there is a slight Republican trend. What predicts whether you’re for torture best is if you approve of President Bush’s policies; basically it’s a loyalty vote. The protorture folk have always—and I mean always, in every poll I’ve seen—been a minority of 35-45% and I’m pretty sure the number is shrinking as the President’s approval numbers dip.

So the good news is that opponents of torture are not alone. I suspect people think the majority of Americans are for torture, but this just isn’t supported by any of the polling. It’s just hype from partisan media, talking heads, and the politicians. The real truth is that there is intelligence out there. What it requires is for government to tap into it and start using it.

5. In the United States, the debate seems to be increasingly focused on waterboarding, which I suspect you’ll agree doesn’t really present any serious questions on the definitional front. Obviously it is torture. But there are other techniques which are much more problematic. One is the sensory-deprivation/sensory-overload technique associated with Kubark. Waterboarding has not been used frequently, at least according to General Hayden, but the sensory-deprivation technique seems to have developed into something close to standard operating procedure, and was even used on a U.S. citizen, Jose Padilla. A psychologist who evaluated him says he was essentially destroyed as a self-actuated human being, capable of independent thought and direction. Is the Bush Administration accomplishing a sort of victory by keeping the debate focused on waterboarding while avoiding discussion of the techniques more commonly employed?

Yes, that’s right. The historical record is clear. Waterboarding is torture, and yes focusing on just waterboarding is a distraction. Waterboarding is serious, but only the tip of the iceberg. There have only been three documented cases of waterboarding, but the CIA has subjected at least 30 others to “enhanced interrogation” as Director Hayden says, so there are other kinds of techniques as well. And there are unaccounted prisoners last seen in US custody as well as secret prisons out there where these things continue to happen.

One day we’ll know more, but the historical record now shows that American interrogators and soldiers, whether authorized or not, have used forced standing, forced kneeling, sleep deprivation, exposure to extremes of heat and cold, beatings on the soles of the feet, sexual humiliation, and psychological coercion, as well as some cases, electrotorture. So it would be a mistake then to confuse the forest from the three tallest trees in it. Waterboarding highlights the huge dangers of torture, but it is only the beginning of political literacy not the end of it.

And the same applies to domestic policing. I’m less worried about our police learning how to waterboard criminals than I am with the use of stun guns and tasers. Any inspector would wonder what straps and a bucket of water would be doing in an interrogation room, and investigate for torture. But they can’t prohibit police from using stun guns and tasers, which have authorized police uses, and it is very hard for them to tell when these devices have been used illegally to torture, as they leave few marks.

Lastly, I think we need to understand that torture just doesn’t hide in a vault in the CIA. It hides in all the dark pockets of society—military barracks, schools, frat houses, our supermax prisons and immigration lockups. When torture happens, the top authorizes, and the people at the bottom come running with the techniques. Vigilance has to extend far beyond our intelligence agencies to all these other areas.

Most dangerously, I think we need to pay attention to our new culture of irresponsibility. We live now in an age where something is or is not torture depending on when and who it is done to. Zapping an angry businessman on an airplane cabin will be called torture, but zapping a foreigner might just be good security and completely excusable. This is bad. All my students at Reed have good intentions, but they don’t all deserve A’s because what they do matters regardless of their intention. Yet police and intelligence officers, not to mention politicians, want to get As just because they had good intentions. They want to be exonerated for having done no torture at all; it’s only torture if they had bad intentions. And that is very dangerous and irresponsible because judging people solely on their intentions, as William Blake said, is the road to hell.

6. This week Congress will again take up the intelligence bill, and the proposal to clarify that the ban on torture accepted by the uniformed services is applicable to all U.S. actors, including the intelligence community. Of course, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 already says that, but the Bush Administration has apparently developed its own secret understanding to the contrary. Part of the argument that has been made in favor of this measure is that the idea of compartmentalization or limitation of torture doesn’t work, that once it is known that certain techniques are being used they spread, or “migrate” in the language of the Army’s Faye-Jones Report. You seem to chart the same sort of migration many times in your study. Are the proponents of the torture ban correct on this?

Yes, torture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.

So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you. Likewise, the techniques that appeared in the War on Terror were already documented in INS lockups in Miami in the 1990s. There is no bright line between domestic and foreign torture; the stuff circulates.

Yes, I am opposed to two track systems, where one group of people can torture and the other people can’t. And it is not hard to understand why. Suppose you’re an interrogator who is not allowed to use some technique, but the guy from the Other Governmental Agency can. What is more, you believe that these techniques work. So why should you be stuck using techniques that are slow and time consuming, when the guy from the OGA can get good results and win all the glory? Aren’t you just an idiot for sticking to the rules? Of course not, and so torture will spread, and that slippery slope is a lot slicker in counterinsurgency conflicts than in domestic policing, as I show in the book.

There are good reasons to believe that whatever these “enhanced techniques are” they will seep into other agencies and organizations. And since many of these techniques leave no marks, it will be impossible to prove that they were even used. We saw this pattern in Iraq and Afghanistan, where soldiers reported having learned their interrogation techniques by imitating CIA field officers.

So I think it is only a matter of time now before new rot sets into the US military thanks to the two track system our government has endorsed. This is inevitable when you codify two track interrogation systems into law. In the 1970s, the Brazilian military had a similar system, and the state had to turn on and kill its torturers in order to preserve itself. As the Brazilian journalist Elio Gaspari observed at the time, “Unless everyone in the army participates in torture, you very quickly develop two kinds of soldiers.” He call them “the combatants,” who fight the terrorists with torture, and the “bureaucrats,” who are committed to preserving the military’s everyday functioning and discipline. In Brazil, the day came when the combatant-torturers refused to accept the orders of the bureaucrats and regarded with contempt their peers who were committed to army disciplines. The generals reluctantly concluded that the “torturers were going to have to be isolated, marginalized, and eliminated, so as to save the Army.”

You can obtain a copy of ‘Torture and Democracy’ at your local bookstore or by placing an on-line order here.

1 comment February 14th, 2008

Remembering when Iran was a democracy

A reminder that Iran was a democracy once… till the United States overthrew it and placed the brutal Shah in power, with his torture chambers:

JustForeignPolicy.org is touring the United States with the experts in this video and others, building a movement against military confrontation with Iran and for real diplomacy. Find out more, sign the petition, and join us: http://www.FollyofAttackingIran.org
[h/t Effect Measure.]

Add comment February 14th, 2008

George McGovern: Why I Believe Bush Must Go

In Sunday’s Washington Post, former Senator and 1972 Democratic Presidential candidate George McGovern calls for impeachment:

Why I Believe Bush Must Go

Nixon Was Bad. These Guys Are Worse.

By George McGovern
Sunday, January 6, 2008; B01

As we enter the eighth year of the Bush-Cheney administration, I have belatedly and painfully concluded that the only honorable course for me is to urge the impeachment of the president and the vice president.

After the 1972 presidential election, I stood clear of calls to impeach President Richard M. Nixon for his misconduct during the campaign. I thought that my joining the impeachment effort would be seen as an expression of personal vengeance toward the president who had defeated me.

Today I have made a different choice.

Of course, there seems to be little bipartisan support for impeachment. The political scene is marked by narrow and sometimes superficial partisanship, especially among Republicans, and a lack of courage and statesmanship on the part of too many Democratic politicians. So the chances of a bipartisan impeachment and conviction are not promising.

But what are the facts?

Bush and Cheney are clearly guilty of numerous impeachable offenses. They have repeatedly violated the Constitution. They have transgressed national and international law. They have lied to the American people time after time. Their conduct and their barbaric policies have reduced our beloved country to a historic low in the eyes of people around the world. These are truly “high crimes and misdemeanors,” to use the constitutional standard.

From the beginning, the Bush-Cheney team’s assumption of power was the product of questionable elections that probably should have been officially challenged — perhaps even by a congressional investigation.

In a more fundamental sense, American democracy has been derailed throughout the Bush-Cheney regime. The dominant commitment of the administration has been a murderous, illegal, nonsensical war against Iraq. That irresponsible venture has killed almost 4,000 Americans, left many times that number mentally or physically crippled, claimed the lives of an estimated 600,000 Iraqis (according to a careful October 2006 study from the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health) and laid waste their country. The financial cost to the United States is now $250 million a day and is expected to exceed a total of $1 trillion, most of which we have borrowed from the Chinese and others as our national debt has now climbed above $9 trillion — by far the highest in our national history.

All of this has been done without the declaration of war from Congress that the Constitution clearly requires, in defiance of the U.N. Charter and in violation of international law. This reckless disregard for life and property, as well as constitutional law, has been accompanied by the abuse of prisoners, including systematic torture, in direct violation of the Geneva Conventions of 1949.

I have not been heavily involved in singing the praises of the Nixon administration. But the case for impeaching Bush and Cheney is far stronger than was the case against Nixon and Vice President Spiro T. Agnew after the 1972 election. The nation would be much more secure and productive under a Nixon presidency than with Bush. Indeed, has any administration in our national history been so damaging as the Bush-Cheney era?

How could a once-admired, great nation fall into such a quagmire of killing, immorality and lawlessness?

It happened in part because the Bush-Cheney team repeatedly deceived Congress, the press and the public into believing that Saddam Hussein had nuclear arms and other horrifying banned weapons that were an “imminent threat” to the United States. The administration also led the public to believe that Iraq was involved in the 9/11 attacks — another blatant falsehood. Many times in recent years, I have recalled Jefferson’s observation: “Indeed I tremble for my country when I reflect that God is just.”

The basic strategy of the administration has been to encourage a climate of fear, letting it exploit the 2001 al-Qaeda attacks not only to justify the invasion of Iraq but also to excuse such dangerous misbehavior as the illegal tapping of our telephones by government agents. The same fear-mongering has led government spokesmen and cooperative members of the press to imply that we are at war with the entire Arab and Muslim world — more than a billion people.

Another shocking perversion has been the shipping of prisoners scooped off the streets of Afghanistan to Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, and other countries without benefit of our time-tested laws of habeas corpus.

Although the president was advised by the intelligence agencies last August that Iran had no program to develop nuclear weapons, he continued to lie to the country and the world. This is the same strategy of deception that brought us into war in the Arabian Desert and could lead us into an unjustified invasion of Iran. I can say with some professional knowledge and experience that if Bush invades yet another Muslim oil state, it would mark the end of U.S. influence in the crucial Middle East for decades.

Ironically, while Bush and Cheney made counterterrorism the battle cry of their administration, their policies — especially the war in Iraq — have increased the terrorist threat and reduced the security of the United States. Consider the difference between the policies of the first President Bush and those of his son. When the Iraqi army marched into Kuwait in August 1990, President George H.W. Bush gathered the support of the entire world, including the United Nations, the European Union and most of the Arab League, to quickly expel Iraqi forces from Kuwait. The Saudis and Japanese paid most of the cost. Instead of getting bogged down in a costly occupation, the administration established a policy of containing the Baathist regime with international arms inspectors, no-fly zones and economic sanctions. Iraq was left as a stable country with little or no capacity to threaten others.

Today, after five years of clumsy, mistaken policies and U.S. military occupation, Iraq has become a breeding ground of terrorism and bloody civil strife. It is no secret that former president Bush, his secretary of state, James A. Baker III, and his national security adviser, Gen. Brent Scowcroft, all opposed the 2003 invasion and occupation of Iraq.

In addition to the shocking breakdown of presidential legal and moral responsibility, there is the scandalous neglect and mishandling of the Hurricane Katrina catastrophe. The veteran CNN commentator Jack Cafferty condenses it to a sentence: “I have never ever seen anything as badly bungled and poorly handled as this situation in New Orleans.” Any impeachment proceeding must include a careful and critical look at the collapse of presidential leadership in response to perhaps the worst natural disaster in U.S. history.

Impeachment is unlikely, of course. But we must still urge Congress to act. Impeachment, quite simply, is the procedure written into the Constitution to deal with presidents who violate the Constitution and the laws of the land. It is also a way to signal to the American people and the world that some of us feel strongly enough about the present drift of our country to support the impeachment of the false prophets who have led us astray. This, I believe, is the rightful course for an American patriot.

As former representative Elizabeth Holtzman, who played a key role in the Nixon impeachment proceedings, wrote two years ago, “it wasn’t until the most recent revelations that President Bush directed the wiretapping of hundreds, possibly thousands, of Americans, in violation of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) — and argued that, as Commander in Chief, he had the right in the interests of national security to override our country’s laws — that I felt the same sinking feeling in my stomach as I did during Watergate. . . . A President, any President, who maintains that he is above the law — and repeatedly violates the law — thereby commits high crimes and misdemeanors.”

I believe we have a chance to heal the wounds the nation has suffered in the opening decade of the 21st century. This recovery may take a generation and will depend on the election of a series of rational presidents and Congresses. At age 85, I won’t be around to witness the completion of the difficult rebuilding of our sorely damaged country, but I’d like to hold on long enough to see the healing begin.

There has never been a day in my adult life when I would not have sacrificed that life to save the United States from genuine danger, such as the ones we faced when I served as a bomber pilot in World War II. We must be a great nation because from time to time, we make gigantic blunders, but so far, we have survived and recovered.

anmcgove@dwu.edu

1 comment January 6th, 2008

In DC: Psychology and Resisting the Drums of War

For readers in the Washington DC area, comin up this Monday:

MONDAY, OCTOBER 1st 6:00-8:00PM
BUSBOYS AND POETS
2021 14th Street, NW
Washington DC 20009
(202-387-POET)
http://www.busboysandpoets.com

 “Resisting the Drums of War: Iraq, Iran, and the Global War on Terror”

Two psychologists will share their expertise on how political leaders garner public support for a war agenda. In the first presentation, Roy Eidelson will use video clip examples to explain how warmongering messages are often designed to target the core concerns that govern our personal and collective lives, including concerns over vulnerability, injustice, distrust, superiority, and helplessness.

In the second presentation, Diane Perlman will describe the role that “psychological intelligence” can play in reversing cycles of violence and reducing terrorism. She will examine the framing, messaging, and techniques used to manipulate the public and to intimidate members of Congress, with a particular focus on current efforts designed to seduce us into war with Iran.

The presentations will be followed by remarks and expert insights from discussants Ray McGovern and Justin Frank.
 **************
Roy Eidelson, PhD, is a psychologist who studies, writes about, and consults on the role of psychological issues in interpersonal and group conflict settings. He is the president of Eidelson Consulting, the former executive director of the University of Pennsylvania’s Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, and an Associate Member of Penn’s Program in Ethnic Conflict. He lives in suburban Philadelphia.

Diane Perlman, PhD, is a clinical and political psychologist with an interest in the image of the enemy, the psychological dynamics of nuclear proliferation, terrorism, and nonviolent conflict transformation. She is a member of Transcend, the Global Council of Abolition 2000, and co-chair of the committee on Global Violence and Security for Psychologists for Social Responsibility. She lives in Washington, DC.

Ray McGovern was a CIA analyst for 27 years from 1963 to 1990. He is a co-founder and steering group member of Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity (VIPS).
 
Justin Frank, M.D. is a clinical professor in the Department of Psychiatry at George Washington University Medical Center and a teaching analyst at the Washington Psychoanalytic Institute. He is the author of Bush on the Couch: Inside the Mind of the President. 

Add comment September 27th, 2007

CNN’s Michael Ware on the state of Iraq

This extended interview with Michael Ware is an astounding, for the American corporate news, account of the reality on the ground in Iraq.

Iraq: The Hidden Wars

“There’s no progress politically, economically, or militarily”. Part 1:

Part 2:

Part 3:

Part 4:

Part 5:

Part 6:

[Thanks to a comment from Mike, who referred us to Middlemostpost.]

1 comment April 23rd, 2007

“We had to imprison the city in order to sve it”

Robert Fisk writes of the plan to turn half of Baghdad into a series of immense prisons, with entire communities completely cut off and surrounded by barrier walls, with IDs required for entry [Divide and rule - America's plan for Baghdad]:

US forces in the city are now planning a massive and highly controversial counter-insurgency operation that will seal off vast areas of the city, enclosing whole neighbourhoods with barricades and allowing only Iraqis with newly issued ID cards to enter.

The campaign of “gated communities” - whose genesis was in the Vietnam War - will involve up to 30 of the city’s 89 official districts and will be the most ambitious counter-insurgency programme yet mounted by the US in Iraq….

S-Iraqi forces will supposedly clear militias from civilian streets which will then be walled off and the occupants issued with ID cards. Only the occupants will be allowed into these “gated communities” and there will be continuous patrolling by US-Iraqi forces. There are likely to be pass systems, “visitor” registration and restrictions on movement outside the “gated communities”. Civilians may find themselves inside a “controlled population” prison.

Part of the reasons may be to prepare for a potential war with Iran:

But the campaign has far wider military ambitions than the pacification of Baghdad. It now appears that the US military intends to place as many as five mechanised brigades - comprising about 40,000 men - south and east of Baghdad, at least three of them positioned between the capital and the Iranian border. This would present Iran with a powerful - and potentially aggressive - American military force close to its border in the event of a US or Israeli military strike against its nuclear facilities later this year.

The plan to turn Baghdad into a series of Fallujahs or Gaza Strips was devised by “wonder boy” General David Petraeus, beloved by Democrats and Republicans alike. The plan is based on the wildly successful counterinsurgency strategies uwed by the United States in Vietnam and the French in Algeria. In those conflicts they showed the ability of hated occupation forces to dominate and pacify resistant populations:

The senior generals who constructed the new “security” plan for Baghdad were largely responsible for the seminal - but officially “restricted” - field manual on counter-insurgency produced by the Department of the Army in December of last year, code-numbered FM 3-24. While not specifically advocating the “gated communities” campaign, one of its principles is the unification of civilian and military activities, citing “civil operations and revolutionary development support teams” in South Vietnam, assistance to Kurdish refugees in northern Iraq in 1991 and the “provincial reconstruction teams” in Afghanistan - a project widely condemned for linking military co-operation and humanitarian aid.

FM 3-24 is harsh in its analysis of what counter-insurgency forces must do to eliminate violence in Iraq. “With good intelligence,” it says, “counter-insurgents are like surgeons cutting out cancerous tissue while keeping other vital organs intact.”

As well as the renowned counterinsurgency successes in Algeria nd Vietnam, the Plan is also based on analysis of counterinsurgency failures:

* FM 3-24 points to Napoleon’s failure to control occupied Spain as the result of not providing a “stable environment” for the population. His struggle, the document says, lasted nearly six years and required four times the force of 80,000 Napoleon originally designated.

Another former senior American officer describes the plan’s likely success:

“Once the additional troops are in place the insurrectionists will cut the lines of communication from Kuwait to the greatest extent they are able,” he told The Independent. “They will do the same inside Baghdad, forcing more use of helicopters. The helicopters will be vulnerable coming into the patrol bases, and the enemy will destroy as many as they can. The second part of their plan will be to attempt to destroy one of the patrol bases. They will begin that process by utilising their people inside the ‘gated communities’ to help them enter. They will choose bases where the Iraqi troops either will not fight or will actually support them.

“The American reaction will be to use massive firepower, which will destroy the neighbourhood that is being ‘protected’.”

Add comment April 11th, 2007