SNL: Hillary Clinton explains why only she can win
All too realistic:
Abu Ghraib and other Iraq abuses reported long before photos, but no one listened
On November 1, 2003, Associated Press reporter Charles Hanley wrote of the terrible abusive conditions in US detention centers in Iraq. As noted by Greg Mitchell of Editor & Publisher, the story was virtually ignored. No major paper published it and no other reporters followed it up. I’m proud to say that my Iraq Occupation and Resistance Report contained a link to the Hanley piece. As I quoted from the article on November 2 2003:
In Iraq’s American detention camps, forbidden talk can earn a prisoner hours bound and stretched out in the sun, and detainees swinging tent poles rise up regularly against their jailers, according to recently released Iraqis.
I’ll post here Mitchell’s article on this, which includes his May 1 2004 [after the Abu Ghraib photos came out and the scandal broke] interview with Hanley, followed by the original 2003 article. In the 2004 interview Hanley presciently said:
My gut tells me the story will spread outward to Guantanamo and Afghanistan and to other prisons in Iraq. I guess it already is.
Imagine how history could have been different if more of the press had done their job instead of acting as conduits for military propaganda and US lies.
Greg Mitchell’s piece:
Four Years Later: Why Did It Take So Long for the Press to Break Abu Ghraib Story?
Charles J. Hanley, Pulitzer winner for the Associated Press, uncovered abuses at the infamous prison months before the scandal really exploded. Why were so many others so slow to act?
By Greg Mitchell
(May 08, 2008) — Four years ago this month, as May unfolded, each day brought fresh horrors, images, or details about the Abu Ghraib prison abuses in Iraq. Pictures of shackled and hooded prisoners gave way to detainees on leashes, cowering before snarling dogs, or just plain beaten and bruised.
On May 10, 2004, an Iraqi human rights official charged that American overseer Paul Bremer had been repeatedly informed about abuses at Abu Ghraib. The New Yorker revealed that Donald Rumsfeld personally okayed a set of procedures that led to the abuses. Several major newspapers called for Rumsfeld to quit.
At that time, in a column, I disclosed how Pulitzer-winning correspondent Charles J. Hanley at The Associated Press had actually “broken” the Abu Ghraib story months before it came out via The New Yorker and other outlets—but the rest of the media had paid it little mind. This led me to ask, Is the press trying to make up for lost time once again?
The media was now bursting with accounts of prison abuse at Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons, but where were they the previous fall when evidence of wrongdoing started to emerge—when a public accounting might have halted what turned out to be the worst of the incidents? “It was not an officially sanctioned story that begins with a handout from an official source,” Hanley told me.
Pressure to increase body count produces civilian deaths
Mark Benjamin and Christopher Weaver of Salon writes of how the military’s pressure of snipers to increase their body count led to the murder of civilians.
The snipers were told they could shoot if someone had “hostile intent”:
The snipers felt they were being pressured to interpret “hostile intent” loosely to justify kills. During testimony, sniper Spc. Joshua Michaud said that Lt. Col. Balcavage and Command Sgt. Maj. Knight “constantly pushed for ‘If you feel threatened, you know, obviously eliminate the threat.’ But they kind of said it in a manner in which a lot of us took it like, ‘Hey, you need to go out there and you guys gotta start getting kills.’”
Additionally, the rules explicitly allowed the killing of civilians:
At worst, the rules explicitly allowed the killing of unarmed Iraqis under certain circumstances, a particularly dicey concept given an enemy that does not wear a uniform and hides among civilians. Specifically, the snipers were allowed to shoot unarmed people running away from explosions or firefights. The chain of command was particularly frustrated by insurgents fleeing after attacks from roadside bombs, called improvised explosive devices. The notes from Army agents who later investigated the shootings said the battalion leaders, Balcavage and Knight, worried that the snipers had “let a lot of guys go after IED explosions.” The snipers called these fleeing, sometimes unarmed Iraqis “squirters.” Of course, it’s not unusual for innocent people to run from explosions.
One soldier involved in a killing got a 10-year sentence. As usual, the officers who created the conditions leading to the brutality were never even investigated:
Top battalion leaders, who had to sign off on the charges, have faced no serious questions about whether their demand for more bodies, their vague rules of engagement or the confusion sown by the secret program might have contributed to the events of spring 2007.
One of the soldiers involved explained succinctly the connection between the type of war and th brutality:
“If you have never been outside the wire, you really have no basis [to judge],” said Hand. “You’ve never been in a life-or-death situation where you have had to count on the guy to your left and right … You see stuff out there that no one back here is going to see.”
The answer is to end the war. Scapegoating a few soldiers will only increase the final death toll by helping to focus attention away from the brutality of occupation and onto the supposed depravity of a few, the perennial “bad apples” that seem to grow whenever rotten trees are not recognized ad pruned.
Media “military analysts” were deployed in 2005 to counter Guantanamo truth
Glenn Greenwald in Salon shows how the Pentagon/TV Networks’ psyops program against the American public included 2005 reports denying the reality of Guantanamo, after Amnesty International described it as “the gulag of our time.” A group of so-called independent “military analysts” went to GTMO.
They spent a grand total of 3 hours and 55 minutes at the Guantanamo detention facilities, with almost one hour of that devoted to lunch with the troops. That was the sum total of their grand tour of the detention facility: less than 3 hours. And then the propaganda campaign to malign and dispute the extensive, amply documented findings of Amnesty was unleashed in full. [Emphasis from Greenwald]
AS one of these “analysts,”Gen. Don Sheppard, said:
“Did we drink the ‘Government Kool-Aid?’ — of course, and that was the purpose of the trip.”
This “analyst” witnessed a show-interrogation and reported on CNN how wonderful the interrogations were at GTMO:
NGUYEN: Let’s back up for just a moment, because you said you said watched an interrogation.SHEPPERD: Yes.
NGUYEN: Kind of explain to us how that played out. And were there any instances of abuse or possible abuse?
SHEPPERD: Absolutely not. These — when I sat and watched them, I want to be very careful in describing them. And I don’t want to describe how we watched or anything of that sort. But basically, you’re able to observe interrogations. They have various ways of monitoring the interrogations and what have you and letting you see what’s going on. With the interrogations that we watched were interrogators, there were translators that translated for the detainee and there were also intelligence people in there.
And they’re basically asking questions. They just ask the same questions over a long period of time. They get information about the person’s family, where they’re from, other people they knew. All the type of things that you would want in any kind of criminal investigation. And these were all very cordial, very professional. There was laughing in two of them that we…
NGUYEN: Laughing in an interrogation?
SHEPPERD: … in the two of them that we watched. Yes, indeed. It’s not — it’s not like the impression that you and I have of what goes on in an interrogation, where you bend people’s arms and mistreat people. They’re trying to establish a firm professional relationship where they have respect for each other and can talk to each other. And yes, there were laughing and humor going on in a couple of these things. And I’m talking about a remark made where someone will smirk or laugh or chuckle.
NGUYEN: All right. General Don Shepperd, we appreciate your time and that look inside Gitmo, with you being there on this tour. Thank you for that. [Emphasis from Greenwald]
Of course, American Psychological Association Presidents Ronald Levant and Gerald Koocher both went on similar demo tours and returned to tell us all they learned. But American Psychiatric Association President Sharfstein was along with APA President Levant and had no trouble realizing what was happening. Apparently, the wool can only be pulled over the eyes of those willing to shut them and turn off all critical faculties.
Conason compares Clinton to George Wallace
Ow! Joe Conason thinks Hillary Clinton is starting “to sound like a reincarnation of the late George Wallace.” That must hurt.
Community psychologist write APA leadership on interrogations
The Society for Community Research and Action [ SCRA: American Psychological Association Division 27] has written a strong and moving letter to the APA leadership expressing SCRA concerns regarding the APA’s position on psychologists participating in interrogations. The letter can be downloaded in pdf format here or read below:
Society for Community Research & Action
The Division of Community Psychology (27) of the American Psychological AssociationApril 18, 2008
Norman Anderson, PhD
CEO, APAAlan Kazdin, PhD
President, APAStephen Behnke, PhD
Director, Ethics Board, APAGentlemen:
We, the Executive Committee of Division 27 [Society for Community Research and Action (SCRA)], are writing to you with the purpose of opening a dialogue regarding the involvement of psychologists in interrogations at military detention centers and CIA black sites. We appreciate the steps that APA has taken of late, including the closing of the loopholes in the 2007 resolution, the banning of psychologists’ participation in specific interrogation techniques as well as their involvement in setting up detention conditions for interrogation purposes, and the writing of letters to the White House.
We propose 3 steps that APA can take to put its values more closely in line with those of its members:
(1) Do not allow psychologists to work for a governing legal authority in settings that violate basic human rights. That is, affirm the referendum sponsored by Withholddues.com.
(2) Follow up on reports of ethical violations by psychologists who participated in interrogations in the military detention centers and CIA black sites.
(3) Change Standard 1.02 of the Ethics Code to be consistent with human rights as well as to be enforceable by APA.
Renounce Hillary Clinton’s racism
I feel obligated to express my disgust, to put it mildly, with the racist turn in Hillary Clinton’s campaign. Not being sure of the best way to do so, I’ve decided to copy and post this entry from Talking Points Memo:
Pretty Black and White
TPM Reader AB is having a hard time reconciling Hillary’s remarks on Obama’s support among working class whites:
It seems to me that every progressive voice in this country should be outraged - jumping up and down - shouting in print and word - to repudiate Hillary Clinton’s remarks that Obama “is having trouble winning over blue collar “white” voters… “white Americans”…It is a disgraceful, shameful tactic to justify her own non-candidacy. This is a remark I would expect from a politician from Mississippi or Louisiana - not from our New York State senator… I am outraged, I am deeply embarrassed that my children have heard this reported on the news…and I regret that have I ever gave her one hard earned nickel.
All the while she touts the glass ceiling as a woman but when her chips are down, the racism springs forth fully formed.
AB is right. Maybe it’s general campaign fatigue, or the sense that the race is all but over now, but a month ago her remarks would have been a huge story, the dominant political story of the day.
The political press spent weeks trying to divine whether the Clinton camp was really attempting to cast Obama as the black candidate, a favorite son candidate of the African American community. The Clinton camp vehemently denied it then and even as recently as a few days ago Bill Clinton claimed it was the Obama camp playing the race card against him.
Race has been the subtext of much of Hillary’s argument for her own electability. But now she’s thrown it right out there in the open: Obama can’t win because he’s black. Vote for me instead.
You don’t have to believe that Hillary’s a racist (I don’t) to conclude that a combination of the rigors of the campaign trail and her own powerful ambitions have clouded her judgment and curdled her spirit. It has certainly soured what had been a historic relationship between the Clintons and the black community.
Hers is not an appeal we’d tolerate from a Republican candidate, nor should we from a Democrat, no matter how sterling her progressive credentials might otherwise be.
There’s been a lot of talk about the damage Hillary will do to the party by staying in the race this long. Perhaps she should consider the damage she’s doing to herself.
–David Kurtz
The one thing I would disagree with is the formulaic statement that David doesn’t think Hillary is racist:
You don’t have to believe that Hillary’s a racist (I don’t)…
After all, we psychologists, and any thinking person living in this society knows that, at some visceral level, we all harbor racist impulses. So, if the term “bot a racist” is to mean anything, it should mean one who fights against those impulses. Someone who chooses, for expediency, to fan these impulese, is a “racist.” After all, the same argument was made about George Wallace, that he wasn’t a “racist,” but only used racist themes for political expediency. And we know that Strom Thurmond had a complex relationship with race, with his mistress and child and all. To accept these arguments is to reduce “racism” to a personal predilection, and ignore the social and systemic aspects that make it so pernicious. Whether Hillary Clinton dislikes black people, or simply chooses to increase hatred of them for her benefit is irrelevant, except to biographers. If she chooses to unleash racism, she’s a racist.
So I would argue that anyone who deliberately appeals to racism for personal benefit, especially in a way likely to increase racial animosity, is a racist. We should not let Clinton, either one of them, off so easy. And we should should shout it from the rooftops. To do any less is to become complicit in the inexcusable.
Marjorie Cohn testimony to Congress on legal responsibility for torture
Marjorie Cohn, President of the national Lawyers guild, testified to Congress on Tuesday regarding legal culpability for US torture by commanders and by the torture lawyers:
Testimony of Marjorie Cohn
“From the Department of Justice to Guantánamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules”
Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties
House Judiciary CommitteeMay 6, 2008
What does torture have in common with genocide, slavery, and wars of aggression? They are all jus cogens. That’s Latin for “higher law” or “compelling law.” This means that no country can ever pass a law that allows torture. There can be no immunity from criminal liability for violation of a jus cogens prohibition.
The United States has always prohibited torture in our Constitution, laws, executive statements, judicial decisions, and treaties. When the U.S. ratifies a treaty, it becomes part of American law under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution.
The Convention Against Torture and Other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, says, “No exceptional circumstances whatsoever, whether a state of war or a threat of war, internal political instability or any other public emergency, may be invoked as a justification for torture.”
Whether someone is a POW or not, he must always be treated humanely; there are no gaps in the Geneva Conventions.
The US War Crimes Act, and 18 USC sections 818 and 3231, punish torture, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment.
The Torture Statute criminalizes the commission, attempt, or conspiracy to commit torture outside the United States.
Reingold on secret laws and legal opinions
Senator Russ Feingold, the only senator to vote against the original Patriot Act, has an LA Times op-ed on the dangers posed by today’s secret laws and legal opinions, such as the long-secret Yoo torture memos. We are not a nation of laws if we don’t know the laws whereby our rulers are acting.
Government in secret
The Yoo memo is just one example of Bush’s hidden lawsBy Russ Feingold
May 8, 2008The Bush administration recently announced it will allow select members of Congress to read Justice Department legal opinions about the CIA’s controversial detainee interrogation program that have been hidden from Congress until now. But as the administration allows a glimpse of this secret law — and it is law — we are left wondering what other laws it is still keeping under lock and key.
It’s a given in our democracy that laws should be a matter of public record. But the law in this country includes not just statutes and regulations, which the public can readily access. It also includes binding legal interpretations made by courts and the executive branch. These interpretations are increasingly being withheld from the public and Congress.
Senators call for investigation of involuntary drugging charges
[UPDATED: Corrected Sen. Hagel's party] Three key Senators — arl Levin (D-MI), Joe Biden (D-DE) and Chuck Hagel (R-NE) — have issued a letter calling for the Defense department and CIA Inspectors General to investigate allegations of forced drugging of detainees reported by the Washington Post and CQ last month. [See my commentary here.] While this call is welcome, it is unfortunate that they do not call for the appointment of an Independent Prosecutor, as the ACLU has done, rather than an in-house investigation. After all, these claims have been known for years now, and the Inspectors General have had adequate time to act. We now need to get investigations out of the mainstream Executive branch.
further, whoever conducts an investigation needs to be pressured to issue a public report on their findings. Only by getting this information out in the clear light of day can the American public take steps to see that these abuses don’t continue. Secret investigations are unacceptable at this point.
Here is the text of the Senator’s letter: (more…)
