Depth of Economic Downturn in Europe Spurs Large Protests

The UK Guardian is reporting that thousands of Europeans in capitals from Paris to Riga to Kiev are taking to the streets to protest the massive unemployment stemming from the economic recession. Millions of East Europeans, tired of Stalinist repression and economic stagnation, were lured to the glittery dreams of the capitalist West. Now, things aren't looking so good.

But even in the big Western states, things are not looking so good. While the U.S. population remains quiescent, placing their hopes in the new Obama administration, American bankers hauled in their sixth-largest year of bonuses, nearly $20 billion, for administering the greatest financial disaster since the 1930s. Some of this money came from taxpayers dollars for the bank bailout. Obama bristled, but nothing will stop this ongoing transfer of wealth to the very richest, all while the official unemployment figures are over 11 million, and growing by 100,000 leaps and bounds.

Meanwhile, in France, the Sarkozy government is so so afraid of their own people -- rioters are busting up the streets of Paris, while a million workers are now on strike -- that they won't even release their latest unemployment figures out of fear of raising even more angry dissent. In Iceland, riot police patrol Reykjavik, and the old government has been forced from power.

But according to the Guardian, it's in the Eastern European countries where the dissatisfaction, and the economic disaster runs deepest:

The old Baltic trading city {Riga] had seen nothing like it since the happy days of kicking out the Russians and overthrowing communism two decades ago. More than 10,000 people converged on the 13th-century cathedral to show the Latvian government what they thought of its efforts at containing the economic crisis. The peaceful protest morphed into a late-night rampage as a minority headed for the parliament, battled with riot police and trashed parts of the old city. The following day there were similar scenes in Vilnius, the Lithuanian capital next door.

After Iceland, Latvia looks like the most vulnerable country to be hammered by the financial and economic crisis. The EU and IMF have already mounted a €7.5bn (£6.6bn) rescue plan but the outlook is the worst in Europe.

The biggest bank in the Baltic, Swedbank of Sweden, yesterday predicted a slump this year in Latvia of a whopping 10%, more than double the previous projections....

A balance of payments crisis last autumn, heavy indebtedness and a disastrous budget made Hungary the first European candidate for an international rescue. The $26bn (£18bn) IMF-led bail-out shows scant sign of working. Industrial output is at its lowest for 16 years, the national currency - the forint - sank to a record low against the euro yesterday and the government also announced another round of spending cuts yesterday.

CCR: Close Torture Loopholes in Army Field Manual

A huge step in the fight against torture took place today. Center for Constitutional Rights has joined Physicians for Human Rights, The Constitution Project -- and myself -- and come out publicly against the abusive interrogation techniques contained in the Army Field Manual.

This is significant because the Army Field Manual is being put forward by President Obama and top Democratic Senators as the proposed "single standard" for all interrogations by the military and the CIA. Meanwhile, old recalcitrant Bushites, and the CIA, are for their part trying to paint the current AFM as "too soft" for use with "terrorist" suspects.

Their "action alert", reprinted below, includes an automated letter that you can send to President Obama asking him to say NO to interrogation practices that include isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and humiliation. It also asks for investigations of those officials " for those officials who broke the law to create an official program of torture and abuse."

From CCR's website:

Close Torture Loopholes in the Army Field Manual

President Obama's three executive orders of January 22, 2009 call for the closing of Guantanamo within one year, the closing of secret CIA 'black sites,' and the limiting of interrogation techniques to those allowed in the Army Field Manual (AFM), eliminating the numerous executive orders and opinions issued during the Bush administration that granted official approval for torture, cruel and inhuman treatment, and abuse. These executive orders certainly represent an extraordinary step forward, but we remain concerned about potentially exploitable loopholes. Please take a moment to ask him to close the loopholes.

While the current Army Field Manual does not allow waterboarding, it does include approved techniques that constitute torture. One glaring problem with the executive order on torture is the implicit approval of the current AFM as it stands. The Army Field Manual is a guidebook for U.S. interrogators, meant to set a standard in accordance with the law. However, it has serious shortcomings - particularly following a Bush-era 2006 revision that attempted to legitimize some of the abuses taking place at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

Please join us in urging President Obama to clarify that his executive order truly means an end to U.S. torture and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment.

Appendix M of the Army Field Manual - a new section introduced in 2006, applicable only to "unlawful combatants," the category applied to detainees in Guantanamo, at secret CIA prisons, and elsewhere - allows the use of techniques such as prolonged isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and inducing fear and humiliation of prisoners. These techniques, especially when used in combination as permitted by the AFM, constitute cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment, and in some cases, torture. These techniques have caused documented, long-lasting psychological and physical harm and were condemned by a bipartisan congressional report released last month, as well as by the Bush-appointed head of the military commissions at Guantanamo.

Much like John Yoo's infamous "torture memos" at the Office of Legal Counsel attempted to provide a legal cover for the authorization of torture by high-ranking Bush administration officials, the addition of Appendix M attempts to provide the same cover, utilizing the Army Field Manual. President Obama's executive order repudiates Yoo's memos - but it is not sufficient to do so without also repudiating this appendix, drafted in light of those memos.

The rewritten 2006 AFM also included other problematic changes - allowing U.S. interrogators to pretend to be from another country, or to pretend the prisoner is located in another country (including countries known for torture and abuse), and allowing interrogators to use "Fear Up," a procedure designed to psychologically exploit prisoners' existing fears - and supplemented to allow interrogators to induce "new fears" in prisoners.

President Obama's executive order created a task force that has six months to examine whether to create "additional or different guidance" for agencies such as the CIA, outside the U.S. military - a potential escape hatch for a return to CIA "enhanced interrogations" and torture.

Please join us today to ask President Obama to reaffirm that his executive order will not provide a loophole for the CIA to return to torture and illegality, and to ensure that Army Field Manual lives up to the standards it is expected to set by revoking Appendix M and other sections of the AFM that could allow torture, abuse, and cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment to continue. It is important that this review be conducted transparently, and with the open consultation of human rights groups. For too long, secrecy has ruled the day and protected torture and abuse.

Join us also in encouraging the Obama administration to fully investigate and prosecute those officials responsible for war crimes, torture and other violations of U.S. law. No future administration should take us back to these dark times. There needs to be individual accountability for the torture program, and other crimes committed. Prosecution is the only way to deter future lawbreakers.

We believe that President Obama wants to end torture through this executive order. Please join us today to help ensure that those goals are fully met.

A Journalist Reports the Truth About Appendix M

William Fisher has written an outstanding yet brief article summarizing the case against the use of abusive techniques of interrogation in the Army Field Manual. The worst methods appear in the last pages of the manual, labeled Appendix M.

John Bradshaw, Director of PHR’s [Physicians for Human Rights] office in Washington, DC, told IPS [Inter Press Service], “The technique of separation allowed by Appendix M sounds innocuous, but in reality it allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation and isolation.”

“Particularly when used in combination, these techniques amount to psychological torture. The Obama Administration must close this loophole in the Army Field Manual by eliminating Appendix M, which leaves the door open to torture,” he said.

Legal experts agree. Marjorie Cohn, President of the National Lawyers Guild, told IPS, “President Obama’s announcement that the United States will not engage in torture is commendable. But cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment or punishment also violate U.S. law, as specified by three treaties we have ratified. The new administration should not use the Army Field Manual as the gold standard for interrogations since Appendix M sanctions techniques, including isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, that amount to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.”

The bulk of the article concentrates on the use of medical professionals in the U.S. torture program. Fisher notes, for instance, that the International Committee of the Red Cross called the participation of doctors and other health professionals, such as psychologists, as part of the interrogation program at Guantanamo a “flagrant violation of medical ethics.”

I should note, that Bill Fisher quotes this blog and some statements of mine favorably, for which I am grateful. It gives one hope that thoughtful and careful journalists are increasingly asking questions about the current proposals to make the AFM the "single standard" for U.S. interrogations. What they are finding is that the important medical, legal, and human rights activists and organizations find the AFM's interrogation techniques to amount, in toto, to torture.

Thank you, Bill Fisher, for helping further the cause of purging torture for good in this country, by critically examining the statements of President Obama about the supposedly humane procedures of the Army Field Manual, and the alarmist, crackpot views of ex-Bush administration officials, like John Yoo, who wrote in today's Wall Street Journal that the AFM doesn't go far enough in allowing freedom to use "coercive interrogation techniques,"

The Foreign Press, Salon.com, & the Army Field Manual

On September 7, 2006, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons showed up at a State Department foreign press briefing on the then-new DoD Directive 2310.10E (on its detainee program) and the also then brand-new Army Field Manual on interrogations [see note at end of post re links]. Only the day before, Kimmons and Stimson had held a news briefing for U.S. reporters at the Department of Defense on the same subjects, which I covered in a recent article at AlterNet.

While few bloggers paid attention to the September 6 DoD briefing (except one noted reporter, as I'll note later), most likely that was because President Bush had one of his infrequent news conferences the same day, and this one was a blockbuster. Bush acknowledged the existence of a secret CIA prison network. He also announced he was ordering the transfer of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and 13 other "high-value detainees" to Guantánamo Bay to be put on trial.

As the Guardian UK described it:

Mr Bush's disclosure was intended to put pressure on the US Congress to support draft legislation put forward by the White House yesterday for a system of military tribunals for the Guantánamo detainees.

The US supreme court struck down the military tribunals established by the administration for the 450 inmates at Guantánamo last June, ruling that they had no basis in US law and violated the Geneva Convention [Hamdan v. Rumsfeld].

The pressure of the Bush administration to get a military commissions process in place, to replace the one thrown out as unconstitutional by the Supreme Court, resulted later that year in Congressional passage of the Military Commissions Act. As described by the ACLU, this infamous legislation, passed with the support of the vast majority of the GOP and certain key Democrats, eliminated "the constitutional due process right of habeas corpus for detainees at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere." It also:

...[gave] any president the power to declare — on his or her own — who is an enemy combatant, decide who should be held indefinitely without being charged with a crime and define what is — and what is not — torture and abuse.

With so much going on at Bush's news conference, who would notice the goings on at DoD, with the decidedly less glamorous Kimmons and Stimson? But one reporter did notice the confluence of events that day. In an article for Salon.com, journalist Mark Benjamin, who had been covering the torture beat for awhile, noted the "mixed messages on torture" emanating from the White House and DoD. While Bush was defending "tough interrogation tactics" and "black site" secret prisons, the DoD spokesmen were lauding the new Army Field Manual as "designed to fit squarely within the protections of the Geneva Conventions." Benjamin quoted Kimmons approvingly, describing the AFM as "humane" and in accord with the views of "conventional senior generals."

Benjamin failed to notice, or report, that the bulk of the Q&A session with reporters at that news conference concentrated on serious questions about whether the Army Field Manual allowed abuse itself, particularly in its Appendix M, which describes an omnibus "technique" called "Separation." Appendix M allows the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and various forms of sensory deprivation on prisoners, mostly to be used with other AFM "approaches," like "Fear Up," "Ego Down," and "Futility."


The reporters grilled Kimmons and Stimson on the AFM and its use of solitary confinement and sensory deprivation. But you wouldn't know that from Benjamin, the alternative and progressive reporter, whose coverage of the event was as obtuse as that of the mainstream press. (See here or here for the full story of that news conference.)

The Foreign Press Have Their Say

The same day Salon.com was publishing Benjamin's article, and the mainstream press was assessing Bush's news conference, Stimson and Kimmons traipsed over to the State Department to give their briefing to the foreign press on 2310.10E and the Army Field Manual. Also in attendance were Brigadier General Thomas L. Hemingway, Legal Adviser to the Appointing Authority, Office of Military Commissions, and Sandra Hodgkinson, State Department Deputy Director, Office of War Crimes Issues.

During the State Dept. news conference, Reymer Luever, from the German newspaper Suddeutche Zeitung, tried to nail down Lt. Gen. Kimmons on the use of the "Separation" technique and the applicability of Geneva Common Article Three. As we will see, skepticism from the press was met with double-talk, and a misrepresentation of the situation of "unlawful enemy combatants" and Geneva protections (bold emphasis added):

QUESTION: Thank you very much General Kimmons. You mentioned the 19 interrogation techniques and the 19 interrogation technique [S]eparation. You mentioned that this isn't covered by -- or is an exception from the Geneva Convention. Are there other exceptions from the Convention, the new manual?

LTG KIMMONS: Well, I take issue with you that it's an exception from the Convention. It's the wording in the Geneva -- the third Geneva Convention that causes us to place separation as a restricted technique and not to employ against prisoners of war or lawful combatants. It is the wording and the requirements of Geneva and the definition within Geneva of what is a lawful enemy combatant, what is a prisoner of war. And clearly al-Qaida and the Taliban and the people we are dealing with now in large portions, you know, of the battlefield do not fit the standard established in Geneva for prison of war or other types of lawful enemy combatants. And therefore, according to Geneva, those type of enemy combatants are not -- are just like spies and saboteurs in the older days. And traditionally are not entitled to the same protections under Geneva.

"Like spies and saboteurs"? Where did Kimmons come up with that? The reference is to the Fourth Geneva Convention on "Protection of Civilian Persons in Time of War." Of course, no one from DoD wants to refer to this GC, because they would have to admit that such prisoners had rights even beyond those in Common Article 3, which protect against violence, "cruel treatment and torture." For instance, there's Article 31:

No physical or moral coercion shall be exercised against protected persons, in particular to obtain information from them or from third parties.

Common Article 3 of the Geneva conventions does not explicitly forbid coercion. Kimmons is correct that the POW Geneva convention has a higher standard, forbidding all forms of coercion upon a POW. Unfortunately, the GCs don't define what they mean by "coercion." But the CIA's 1963 Kubark interrogation manual does.

Jennifer Elsen, in an an essay on the "Lawfulness of Interrogation Techniques Under the Geneva Conventions," in The Treatment of Prisoners (ed. R.D. McPhee, 2006, Nova Science Publishers), pointed out that the CIA distinguished between coercive and non-coercive interrogations. Coercive interrogations were those "designed to induce regression," producing a loss of general cognitive capacities, including the ability to deal with complex situations, or the ability to "cope with repeated frustrations." The tools of the coercive interrogator include the induction of fatigue, pain, sleep loss, anxiety, fear, and the "deprivation of sensory stimuli through solitary confinement or similar methods."

According to the Civilian convention, for which any prisoner, "including members of armed forces who have laid down their arms and those placed hors de combat by sickness, wounds, detention, or any other cause," which definition being part of Common Article 3 the U.S. government accepts for those captured in their "war on terror," spies and saboteurs have "forfeited rights of communication." Does this mean one can lock them up and throw away the key? The Civilian convention goes on:

In each case, such persons shall nevertheless be treated with humanity, and in case of trial, shall not be deprived of the rights of fair and regular trial prescribed by the present Convention. They shall also be granted the full rights and privileges of a protected person under the present Convention at the earliest date consistent with the security of the State or Occupying Power, as the case may be.

"Full rights and privileges of a protected person"... that doesn't sound like one could be subject to coercive interrogation, does it?

Let's go back to the briefing, and pick up just where we left off. Kimmons, asked if there exceptions to Geneva in the AFM, had noted that unlawful enemy combatants were "not entitled to the same protections under Geneva" as prisoners of war. But in his very next sentence, Kimmons continued, in an entirely different, and confusing vein:

As a matter of law here in the United States, we are going to provide the same single standard for humane treatment to all categories of detainees, both lawful and unlawful combatants.

That same legal requirement does not require us to afford additional privileges above and beyond that standard to unlawful combatants. And that's why separation is placed -- separated to it.

I'm sorry, could you repeat the second part of your question.

QUESTION: My question was are there other -- what I have called exceptions from the Convention in the field manual?

LTG KIMMONS: No. In accordance, as a matter of law, only those interrogation approach techniques that are listed in -- authorized by the Army Field Manual, this field manual, can be employed on any class of category of detainee across the Department of Defense.

The last statement makes no sense when compared with Kimmons remarks during his opening statement, remarks to which Mr. Luever alluded in his question above. For in that statement, Lt. Gen. Kimmons stated (bold emphasis added):

Separation meets the standard for humane treatment, but the Geneva Conventions, specifically the third Geneva Convention, affords prisoners of war, lawful enemy combatants, additional protections above and beyond the single humane standard to which they're entitled. It entitles them to pay, entitles them to send and receive mail and packages, and it also protects them from separation from other prisoners of war with whom they were captured without their expressed consent.

Unlawful combatants are not entitled to those additional protections and privileges above the humane standard. So Geneva -- the common third -- Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions applies to all categories of detainees' [there may be missing text in the transcript here] [S]eparation, however, is only authorized for use on a by-exception basis with unlawful enemy combatants.

Threading the eye of the needle, DoD means to say one thing one moment and another thing the next. What's clear is that they believe Separation is not a group of techniques that can be used on regular POWs, only "unlawful enemy combatants." But the privileges enumerated by the third Geneva Convention -- Kimmons lists pay, getting mail and packages -- does not include in its text, as Kimmons maintains, the right not to experience "separation," i.e., solitary confinement, sleep and perceptual deprivation, etc.

This can all get quite confusing, but seems to boil down to this. The Pentagon, and perhaps their CIA mentors, want to slice and dice the Geneva Conventions at their will, in order to allow the core program of coercive interrogation as laid down by the CIA's Kubark manual, using the Army Field Manual and Appendix M as their primary device. Because of the Abu Ghraib scandal, they want to hide or forbid all types of treatment that became notorious due to press exposure, and that includes the revelations around waterboarding. But the induction of regression, of a paradigm the CIA referred to as DDD (Dependency, Debility, Dread), is still at the core of the coercive techniques they intend to rescue for their use.

And because of the ignorance or indifference, or in some cases, collusion, of the press and politicians, it appears that they will get their way.

Tale of a Broken Link

I had wanted to go back and review the entire foreign press briefing again, but, as described below, the webpages for it were gone. I tried to use the handy Wayback Machine, but it apparently was never logged or entered there. [UPDATE: Edger at Docudharma has successfully negotiated the Wayback Machine when I apparently couldn't. The URL for the State Department briefing is here, via a cache of the page. The State Department webpages themselves are still gone, and I've left the old links in for documentary purposes. So please read the following keeping that in mind. Big H/T to Edger!]

As this story "goes to press," I discovered that the link to the transcript of the State Department/Kimmons/Stimson briefing for the foreign press, hosted at State Department servers, is now defunct. A search of the site brings up old links to the appropriate html file, but the file itself is gone. The file I used was titled thus (found only now through a Google cache, where it was listed along with other foreign press briefings):

--09/07/06 Department of Defense Directive on Detainee Operations, the Release of the Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collection and an Update on Military Commissions; Cully Stimson, Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs; Foreign Press Center Briefing; Washington, DC -- Official Transcript

I should note this does not appear to be a global deletion of State Department files by date, as a different State Department document, that is, yet another briefing to the foreign press earlier on the same date (9/7/06) as the Kimmons/Stimson briefing, this time with State Department Legal Advisor John Bellinger, is available on State Department servers under the title "Press briefing on detainee issues and military commission legislation."

The difference between these two briefings? While the foreign press asked good hard questions during the Bellinger briefing, none concerned specifics about the Army Field Manual -- no embarrassing questions about "separation" or sensory deprivation.

Yet, I cannot conclude there is any grand conspiracy regarding any missing webpages, since, upon looking, there appear to be plenty of other missing or scrubbed files from the Bush years, through 2008. Is this routine house-cleaning, or something else? I honestly don't know. I only know that the transcript to the briefing was there a few months back, and I apologize to readers for quoting and reporting upon an event that one cannot now fact-check for accuracy.

Erda's Warning

"Weiche, Wotan!" -- If you don't know why Wotan must "beware", then you haven't been paying attention.

From Richard Wagner's Das Rheingold, the Met, conducted by James Levine. Birgitta Svenden is Erda, and James Morris is Wotan.

Wie alles war - weiss ich;
wie alles wird,
wie alles sein wird, -
seh' ich auch,
der ew'gen Welt
Urwala,
Erda, mahnt deinen Mut.
Drei der Töchter,
urerschaff'ne,
gebar mein Schoss;
was ich sehe,
sagen dir nächtlich die Nornen.
Doch höchste Gefahr
führt mich heut'
selbst zu dir her.
Höre! Höre! Höre!
Alles was ist, endet.
Ein düst'rer Tag
dämmert den Göttern:
dir rat' ich, meide den Ring!

"Medical Ethics and Torture: Revising the Declaration of Tokyo"

The following is a press release from The Lancet, describing an important new article on the question of medical ethics in relation to the torture of prisoners. It is reproduced here:

A Viewpoint in this week’s edition of The Lancet discusses how the 1975 Declaration of Tokyo, on Medical Ethics and Torture, could be further revised to make it more relevant to the world today — making sure that physicians who are complicit in torture of prisoners are held to account. The Viewpoint is written by Dr Steven Miles, Center for Bioethics, University of Minnesota, MN, USA, and Dr Alfred Freedman, New York Medical College, USA.

Medical complicity with torture and abuse of prisoners is common in the roughly 100 countries that practise torture. Physicians devise ways to keep physical scars to a minimum, certify prisoners as fit for abuse, monitor vital signs during mistreatment, and give approval to intensify abuse. A third to half of torture survivors report physicians overseeing the abuse; this number does not include those who do not see physicians being accomplices of the abuse and those who die of torture that a physician, either willingly or under coercion, certifies as death by natural causes. Many more physicians are complicit with abusing prisoners than work in programmes to treat torture survivors.

The World Medical Association’s (WMA) Declaration of Tokyo has been a landmark event in medical ethics. It was passed in 1975, and has undergone several revisions. The declaration condemns medical participation in torture, and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, or any act to diminish the ability of the victim to resist such treatment. It serves as a template for many medical codes. Although the WMA updated the Declaration of Tokyo in 2006, a revised version might further clarify medical roles and duties in countries where prisoners are abused.

The authors propose four manners in which the code should be revised. First, it should incorporate authoritative definitions of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment, to harmonise this medical ethics code with international law and, thereby, communicate the accountability of physicians to international law. Second, a revision of the Declaration of Tokyo should incorporate some of the good ideas recently endorsed by various clinical societies — for example, a death certificate should be publicly posted for every death in custody, as is currently mandated for prisoners of war by a Geneva Convention. False or non-issued death certificates conceal torture. Third, a revision of the Declaration of Tokyo must commend ways for holding physicians professionally and criminally accountable for abetting abuse of prisoners — including those who flee the country where the abuse occurred and attempt to obtain a licence to practice elsewhere. Finally, a revision of the Declaration of Tokyo should be readable by a person with 12 years of education — the current version needs advanced collegiate-grade reading skills, with its average sentence containing more than 30 words.

The authors conclude: “The medical community is key to the campaign against torture. Governments that practice torture need complicity of prison medical personnel. Furthermore, a profound link exists between domestic torture and worldwide medical solidarity against torture. A physician community that acquiesces to abuses by its members undermines its credibility in protesting against foreign medical communities or colleagues who abet torture. Accordingly, physicians and their societies must act on their duty to promote prisoners’ wellbeing, access to prisons, skills at identifying abuse, and membership of civil society.”

Of special interest in Miles and Freedman's article is their delineation of what they call unofficial teaching definitions of torture and cruel, inhumane, and degrading treatment or punishment. (The article covers the de jure definitions, as well). These two categories are often buried in legalese and, therefore, confusion. Their "unofficial definition" is meant to cut through the obfuscations:

Torture is any act that intends to cause a prisoner to feel severe physical or mental pain or suffering. Torture occurs when a government official orders, supervises, consents to, allows, or performs acts that cause such pain or suffering.

Torture is unacceptable for any reason, including when it is used to:

-- obtain information or a confession from the tortured person or someone else or
-- punish the tortured person or someone else for an act that he or she has done or is suspected of having done or
-- frighten or coerce the tortured person or someone else or
-- discriminate against a race, religion, political belief
-- or any other reason

This definition does not include pain or suffering that is caused by legal prison conditions and sentences

Cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment or punishment is any physical or mental abuse. Among other things, it includes depriving a prisoner of sight, hearing, and awareness of place or the passing of time.

Furthermore:

A physician [or any treating professional, such as a psychologist] should not:

-- assist with torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment
-- be present when a prisoner is subject to, or threatened with, torture and cruel, inhumane, or degrading treatment
-- provide or withhold clinical facilities, equipment, supplies, or knowledge to support torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment
-- assist procedures that aim to decrease a prisoner's ability to resist interrogation or punishment;
-- withhold, or threaten to withhold, medical assessment or treatment from a prisoner who is not cooperating with officials;
-- assist in certifying a prisoner's fitness for interrogation, treatment, or punishment that might harm that person's physical or mental health
-- assist in monitoring an interrogation, treatment, or punishment to advise officials to modify procedures that might harm a prisoner's physical or mental health.

Miles and Freedman note that there is a "pandemic of torture" going on in the world. The attempt to squeeze torture techniques into the U.S. Army Field Manual, and furthermore cover up the attempt, is only one aspect of this frightening spread of the torture cancer. Arm in arm with it, there is an attack on civil liberties in general, and a glorification of militarism and brutality in public life and political action. The invasion and attack on Gaza, the missile attacks by U.S. robot aircraft in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the massive death of civilians in Iraq, the Congo, Somalia, and elsewhere around the world are part and parcel of the torture ethic, which reduces human beings to mere things, despised objects, and victims of national greed and will.

American Psychological Association: An Object Lesson in Ethics Failure

Doctors and ethicists such as Steven Miles and Alfred Freedman, and their colleagues in human rights and medical organizations around the world are to be applauded for their attempts to turn back the tide of dehumanization and violence.

Compare this to the actions of the American Psychological Association, who, weeks now after the head judge at Guantanamo condemned the interrogation of Mohammad al-Qahtani as "torture", refuses to even utter a statement of condemnation or regret for the participation of one of its members, John Leso, in this abomination of an interrogation. Instead, they have dragged out an ethics investigation of this same individual for over a year. Meanwhile, the same institution is trying to pretend that it is suddenly interested in revamping an ethics clause (1.02) that allows its members to follow "authorities" who may command them to undertake actions that go against their ethics code.

If Stephen Behnke, the ethics director of APA, had any self-respect, or if the organization itself had any integrity, he would have resigned or been fired after the Crawford revelations on the al-Qahtani torture interrogation.

It certainly seems like the world is being swept by a pandemic of torture, war, and brutality. The primary sources of information for the populace do little to educate the public, or push fear and misinformation. These are terrible times, indeed. The new U.S. president proclaims this a time of progressive change and hope. But no president can undertake alone the massive social changes that are needed. That is up to each of us, and that is the message I believe Miles and Freedman are giving us. While international law and institutions press to change national deformations, each individual in each profession must take responsibility upon themselves to provide ethical leadership.

More Musings on Those Missing Gitmo Files

In an earlier posting, I surmised that the "disarray" of files discovered at Guantanamo were due to conflicts over documentation with the CIA (per a Washington Post suggestion), or because there was a cover-up of certain operations within Guantanamo, also related, at least in part, to CIA activity. I also wondered if some documentation hadn't been in fact destroyed.

The excerpt below from an excellent article by Alfred McCoy on the CIA at Abu Ghraib points, I believe, to the answer to a lot of questions. I'm thinking Guantanamo... Abu Ghraib... was the CIA standard operating procedure in these cases very different?

Few in the press have followed up on McCoy's excellent analysis. How well I understand that problem. Anyway, this is from his 2004 article, "The Hidden History of CIA Torture: America's Road to Abu Ghraib" (bold emphases added are mine):

With the controversy over Abu Ghraib, incidents that once seemed but fragments should now be coming together to form a mosaic of a clandestine agency manipulating its government and deceiving its citizens to probe the cruel underside of human consciousness, and then propagating its discoveries throughout the Third World.

Strong democracies have difficulty dealing with torture. In the months following the release of the Abu Ghraib photos, the United States moved quickly through the same stages (as defined by author John Conroy) that the United Kingdom experienced after revelations of British army torture in Northern Ireland in the early 1970s -- first, minimizing the torture with euphemisms such as "interrogation in depth"; next, justifying it on grounds that it was necessary or effective; and finally, attempting to bury the issue by blaming "a few bad apples."

Indeed, since last April, the Bush administration and much of the media have studiously avoided the word "torture" and instead blamed our own bad apples, those seven Military Police....

In August [2004], Major General George R. Fay released his report on the role of Military Intelligence at Abu Ghraib. Its stunning revelations about the reasons for this torture were, however, obscured in opaque military prose. After interviewing 170 personnel and reviewing 9,000 documents, the general intimated that this abuse was the product of an interrogation policy shaped, in both design and application, by the CIA.

Significantly, General Fay blamed not the "seven bad apples," but the Abu Ghraib interrogation procedures themselves. Of the 44 verifiable incidents of abuse, one-third occurred during actual interrogation. Moreover, these "routine" interrogation procedures "contributed to an escalating 'de-humanization' of the detainees and set the stage for additional and severe abuses to occur."

After finding standard Army interrogation doctrine sound, General Fay was forced to confront a single, central, uncomfortable question: what was the source of the aberrant, "non-doctrinal" practices that led to torture during interrogation at Abu Ghraib? Scattered throughout his report are the dots, politely unconnected, that lead from the White House to the Iraqi prison cell block: President Bush gave his defense secretary broad powers over prisoners in November 2001; Secretary Rumsfeld authorized harsh "Counter-Resistance Techniques" for Afghanistan and Guantanamo in December 2002; hardened Military Intelligence units brought these methods to Iraq in July 2003; and General Ricardo Sanchez in Baghdad authorized these extreme measures for Abu Ghraib in September 2003.

In its short answer to this uncomfortable question, General Fay's report, when read closely, traced the source of these harsh "non-doctrinal methods" at Abu Ghraib to the CIA. He charged that a flouting of military procedures by CIA interrogators "eroded the necessity in the minds of soldiers and civilians for them to follow Army rules." Specifically, the Army "allowed CIA to house 'Ghost Detainees' who were unidentified and unaccounted for in Abu Ghraib," thus encouraging violations of "reporting requirements under the Geneva Conventions." Moreover, the interrogation of CIA detainees "occurred under different practices and procedures which were absent any DoD visibility, control, or oversight and created a perception that OGA [CIA] techniques and practices were suitable and authorized for DoD operations." With their exemption from military regulations, CIA interrogators moved about Abu Ghraib with a corrupting "mystique" and extreme methods that "fascinated" some Army interrogators. In sum, General Fay seems to say that the CIA has compromised the integrity and effectiveness of the U.S. military.

Sign Petition to Protest Gaza Civilian Destruction

Stephen Soldz has posted the following at his blog, Psyche, Science and Society. I reproduce it here for its importance, and strongly recommend mental health professionals both sign the petition, and distribute it to their colleagues.

The Israeli group “Psychoactive”: Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, has created a petition — Online petition - Israeli Attack on Gaza: Protest, Grief and Call for Negotiations — for mental health professionals world-wide to protest the civilian destruction during the Israeli attack on Gaza.

The Petition reads:

Psychoactive Group – Mental Health Professionals for Human Rights, and the undersigned supporters, condemn the killing of innocents that has being carried out by the state of Israel in Gaza.

We are horrified by the extent of the killing, the destruction, and the violence that we have been witnessing over the past weeks in the Israeli offensive on Gaza. In addition to its being an attack on human lives, we consider this assault as a profound violation of our human values. As therapists we hereby express our profound concern over the physical and mental injuries, current as well as ongoing, that are being inflicted upon the citizens of Gaza. Such traumatization undermines both peoples’ prospects of living in peace and dignity, as well as the possibility of ending the occupation while pulling out of the circles of hatred, fear, and violence.

In addition, we strongly condemn the military assault on the Mental Health Center in Gaza and on other civilian institutions: Schools, universities, mosques, and clinics. We view this assault as a brutal destruction of the civilian infrastructure that has heretofore managed to survive under circumstances of continuous siege.

We condemn any damage caused to the civilian infrastructure in Gaza and in Israel and mourn the price paid by civilians for the absence of a political accord.

We support the workers at the Mental Health Center in Gaza and appreciate our colleagues’ activities for treating civilians and promoting their well-being under impossible circumstances.

We call for an end to the assault on the civilians in southern Israel, who have been enduring missile attacks for years. We believe that the assault on Gaza is not the way to protect Israeli civilians, and that only negotiations for terminating the occupation can provide a means for achieving regional quiescence.

We call for the immediate channeling of resources to repair the damage, for the promotion of civil discussion between the peoples, and for political negotiations to end the occupation.

To read it in Hebrew or Arabic and to sign it, go here.

Meanwhile, back at Gitmo... Hey, where's the files?

If there were no better evidence of Bush administration and Defense Department malfeasance, then the fact the the files on the prisoners at Guantanamo are, according to this latest Washington Post story, "in disarray" would seal the case.

According to the article, "incoming [Obama] legal and national security officials [were] barred until the inauguration from examining classified material on the detainees." Why? No one could say exactly, but there was this:

Several former Bush administration officials agreed that the files are incomplete and that no single government entity was charged with pulling together all the facts and the range of options for each prisoner. They said that the CIA and other intelligence agencies were reluctant to share information, and that the Bush administration's focus on detention and interrogation made preparation of viable prosecutions a far lower priority.

What was going on at Guantanamo? Was it really even a detention center? Even a lousy county jailhouse keeps better records than this:

In a court filing this month, Darrel Vandeveld, a former military prosecutor at Guantanamo who asked to be relieved of his duties, said evidence was "strewn throughout the prosecution offices in desk drawers, bookcases packed with vaguely-labeled plastic containers, or even simply piled on the tops of desks."

He said he once accidentally found "crucial physical evidence" that "had been tossed in a locker located at Guantanamo and promptly forgotten."

What kinds of information was the CIA and defense intelligence agencies unwilling to share? After years and years of detention, much of it in isolation and subject to various torture techniques, including possible drug administration, what kind of valuable intelligence was really available anyway? Suspicions among some that Guantanamo was really a vast experiment, or a giant laboratory for psychological torture research, such as occurred during the MKULTRA CIA program of the 1950s and 1960s starts to seem like something more than irresponsible speculation.

Although the article doesn't mention it, who can read of such disarray, such misplacement and scattering of documents and not think that what we are seeing is the aftermath of one giant document purge and shred-fest?

Those investigating committees and prosecution grand juries better get underway quickly, before all the relevant evidence is destroyed about whatever did happen at Guantanamo.

And then there's a little fact like chain of evidence, access to documents, etc.

Why take a year to dispose of the prisoners' fate? Why not free all the Gitmo prisoners now? Their rights have been trampled upon, and many tortured. There is no way to guarantee there has been no evidence tampering. There is no way we can now believe anything the government has to say about any of these prisoners.

I don't expect any such large-scale release. I'm not sure what I expect anymore. But the news has some other items of very important interest. There was this, from the United Nations:

Manfred Nowak, the United Nations Special Rapporteur on Torture, told a German television network that Bush and Cheney should be brought to trial for the torture of prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

Manfred Nowak says prosecution is legally required, because the U.S. has ratified the UN convention on torture. Last month, a bipartisan Senate report accused Rumsfeld and other top Bush administration officials of direct responsibility for abuse and torture at Guantánamo and other U.S. prisons.

And this from Jordan Praust, a contributing editor at the Jurist:

International laws that President Obama must faithfully execute during an armed conflict include common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions as well as all other treaty-based and customary laws of war, the Convention Against Torture, the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (which also prohibits torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment in all circumstances, including in times of relative peace), and related customary international laws. President Obama’s executive order to replace unlawful authorizations and orders during the Bush Administration with the requirement that such laws be faithfully executed by all U.S. nationals and certain other persons covered by the Order is the constitutionally proper and necessary response.

What should ultimately follow is presidential execution of treaty-based and customary international legal obligations to either initiate prosecution of or to extradite all persons who are reasonably accused of having authorized, ordered, abetted, or perpetrated war crimes and/or crimes against humanity. For example, Article 146 of the 1949 Geneva Civilian Convention expressly and unavoidably requires that all Parties “search for persons alleged to have committed, or to have ordered to be committed, ... grave breaches [of the Convention] and shall bring such persons, regardless of their nationality, before its own courts” for “effective penal sanctions” or, “if it prefers, ... hand such persons over for trial to another High Contracting Party.” The obligation is absolute and applies with respect to alleged perpetrators of any status. As a party to the Geneva Conventions, the United States must either initiate prosecution or extradite to another state or, today, render an accused to the International Criminal Court. “Grave breaches” of the Convention include “torture or inhuman treatment” and transfer of a non-prisoner of war from occupied territory. Similarly, Article 7, paragraph 1, of the Convention Against Torture expressly and unavoidably requires that a Party to the treaty “under whose jurisdiction a person alleged to have committed ... [for example, torture or “complicity or participation in torture”] is found, shall ... if it does not extradite him, submit the case to its competent authorities for the purpose of prosecution.” There are no other alternatives.

The criminals are busily trying to cover their tracks. They should be arrested as soon as possible, and that means Rumsfeld, Bush, Cheney, relevant personnel at DoD Office of Legal Counsel, relevant personnel at Joint Personnel Recovery Agency and SERE, and at CIA and DIA. Those who have left their jobs since the crimes were committed should be given an offer to surrender themselves.

And someone is going to have to put together the Augean stable that is the mess of documentation at Guantanamo.

German Pope Rehabilitates Holocaust Denier

Jesus, this headline practically wrote itself, as Reuters reports that Pope Benedict lifted the excommunications of four far-right bishops belonging to the Society of Saint Pius X. Now, I don't care about the internal policies of the Roman Catholic Church, and what their ceremonies should be, or who should name bishops, or whatever the controversies over how to administrate this leftover from medieval times are.

But one of the four restored bishops is Richard Williamson, who has become notorious for making statements denying the extent of the Holocaust. From the article:

In comments to Swedish television broadcast on Wednesday and widely available on the Internet, Williamson said "I believe there were no gas chambers" and only up to 300,000 Jews perished in Nazi concentration camps, instead of 6 million.

"I believe that the historical evidence is hugely against 6 million having been deliberately gassed in gas chambers as a deliberate policy of Adolf Hitler," he said.

Besides the obscenity that such a statement is, the sentiments feed anti-Semitic attitudes among many impressionable and/or bigoted people. They are also fertile recruiting slogans for the Zionists who run Israel, because they can point to such poisonous statements, now seemingly okay within Vatican circles, as a rationale for the nationalism that fuels Israel's attacks on the Palestinians and their leadership, such as the recent assault on Gaza that killed hundreds of Palestinian civilians.

Meanwhile, the Vatican thumbed its nose at Jewish leaders who protested the Pope's actions. Calling Williamson's holocaust denial merely "open to criticism", a Vatican spokesman said the comments were"'totally extraneous' to the lifting of the excommunications."

But Jewish leaders did not accept the explanation. They questioned why the Vatican had not issued a clear statement condemning Williamson and one said privately the decree represented "a nail in the coffin of 50 years of dialogue."

The Pope's actions should clearly be condemned.

How the Press, the Pentagon, and Even Human Rights Groups Sold Us an Army Field Manual that (Still) Sanctions Torture

Originally published at AlterNet -- If you wish to repost this essay you can download a .txt file of the html here (right click and save). Permission granted.

A January 17 New York Times editorial noted that Attorney General designate Eric Holder testified at his nomination hearings that when it came to overhauling the nation's interrogation rules for both the military and the CIA, the Army Field Manual represented "a good start." The editorial noted the vagueness of Holder's statement. Left unsaid was the question, if the AFM is only a "good start," what comes next?

The Times editorial writer never bothered to mention the fact that three years earlier, a different New York Times article (12/14/2005) introduced a new controversy regarding the rewrite of the Army Field Manual. The rewrite was inspired by a proposal by Senator John McCain to limit U.S. military and CIA interrogation methods to those in the Army Field Manual. (McCain would later allow an exception for the CIA.)

According to the Times article, a new set of classified procedures proposed for the manual was "was pushing the limits on legal interrogation." Anonymous military sources called the procedures "a back-door effort" to undermine McCain's efforts at the time to change U.S. abusive interrogation techniques, and stop the torture.

A Forgotten Controversy

Over the next six months or so, a number of articles in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and the L.A. Times described the course of the controversy. By mid-June 2006, the NYT was reporting that, under pressure from unnamed senior generals and members of Congress (including McCain, and Senators Warner and Graham), the Pentagon was rethinking its plan to have a classified annex to the AFM, which would include a different set of interrogation rules for "unlawful combatants," like the detainees at Guantanamo. Included in the discussion about these classified procedures were, reportedly, members of the State Department and various human rights organizations.

According to an article in the L.A. Times, this latest fight over the classified procedures went back at least to mid-May 2006. The manual itself had been written at the U.S. Army Intelligence Center at Ft. Huachuca, Arizona, roughly a year earlier, and then sent to the Pentagon for further evalution. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld's right-hand man, Stephen Cambone, was put in charge of its final draft. According the L.A. Times article, members of Congress were "keen to avoid a public fight with the Pentagon." The announcement that the controversial and still unknown procedures might not be included in the manual was seen as a success by human rights groups.

Yet the proverbial chickens never hatched, and by early September 2006 the new Army Field Manual was finally released. The section on special interrogation procedures for "unlawful combatants" was included as a special appendix (Appendix M), and published in unclassified format. According to a L.A. Times story on September 8, Cambone was crowing that the new Army Field Manual instructions would give interrogators "what they need to do the job." The article noted:

The new manual includes one restricted technique that will only be used on so-called unlawful combatants – such as Al Qaeda suspects – not traditional prisoners of war.

That technique, called “separation,” involves segregating a detainee from other prisoners. Military officials said separation was not the equivalent of solitary confinement and was consistent with Geneva Convention protections.

As for the proposed secrecy surrounding the new techniques, the Pentagon had decided it couldn't keep them secret forever. Senator Warner was also on record as against any classified annex to the manual.

Not long ago, I wrote about what was included in Appendix M, which purports to introduce the single technique of "separation." In fact, the Appendix M includes instructions regarding solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and, in combination with other procedures included in the Army Field Manual, amounted to a re-introduction of the psychological torture techniques practiced at Guantanamo, and taught by Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape, or SERE psychologists and other personnel at the Cuban base and elsewhere.

The rewrite of the Army Field Manual included other seemingly minor changes. It introduced dubious procedures, such as the "False Flag" technique, wherein interrogators could pretend they were from another country. It also redefined the meaning of "Fear Up," a procedure meant to exploit a prisoner's existing fears under imprisonment. Now, interrogators could create "new" fears. The AFM rewrite was a masterpiece of subterfuge and double talk, which could only have been issued from the offices of Rumsfeld and Cambone.

One would think this turnaround of the Pentagon's position regarding a removal of these controversial procedures would have been a matter of some note. But there was no protest from Congress, no mention of the past controversy in the press, and only vague comments at first and then acceptance by human rights organizations like Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch. Only Physicians for Human Rights protested the inclusion of the techniques listed in Appendix M. For the rest... silence.

DoD Rolls Out the New Model

On September 6, 2006, a news briefing was held by the Department of Defense, as part of the unveiling of the new Army Field Manual, in conjunction with the then-new Defense Department Directive for Detainee Programs (DoD Directive 2310.01E). Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs Cully Stimson and Army Deputy Chief of Staff for Intelligence (G-2) Lt. Gen. John Kimmons were the DoD presenters.

Much of the belief that the AFM provides an improvement over previous policies of the Department of Defense is likely due to a confusion between the two documents introduced that summer of 2006, the new Detainee Program Directive and the new Army Field Manual.

DoD Directive 2310.10E made a number of changes in regards to detainee operations and management. It made clear that "All persons subject to this Directive shall observe the requirements of the law of war, and shall apply, without regard to a detainee’s legal status, at a minimum the standards articulated in Common Article 3 to the Geneva Conventions of 1949..." The same type of language appears in the text of the Army Field Manual itself.

During the press briefing on September 6, and a different one the next day for the foreign press, reporters were not so easily fooled.

One unnamed reporter at the DoD briefing challenged Lt. Gen. Kimmons on the "single standard" issue:

Q General, why was the decision made to keep these categories -- the separate categories of detainees? You have traditional prisoners of war and then the unlawful enemy combatants. Why not treat all detainees under U.S. military custody the exact same way?

Kimmons's answer gives us insight into the kind of convoluted legal thinking that went into the Pentagon's rationale for the acceptability of coercive interrogation -- for some (emphasis added):

GEN. KIMMONS: Well, actually, the distinction is in Geneva through the Geneva Convention, which describes the criteria that prisoner -- that lawful combatants, such as enemy prisoners of war -- which attributes they possess -- wearing a uniform, fighting for a government, bearing your arms openly and so on and so forth. And it's all spelled out fairly precisely inside Geneva.

Geneva also makes clear that traditional, unlawful combatants such as in the -- 50 years ago, we would have talked about spies and saboteurs, but also now applies to this new category of unlawful -- or new type of unlawful combatant, terrorists, al Qaeda, Taliban.

They clearly don't meet the criteria for prisoner of war status, lawful combatant status, and so they're not entitled to the -- therefore to the extra protections and privileges which Geneva affords.

But Kimmon's clarification was not very helpful. In fact, if a prisoner is judged not a "lawful combatant", then he or she immediately becomes covered by Geneva IV, the "Civilian Convention," which protects anyone "who, at a given moment and in any manner whatsoever find themselves" held prisoner. According to the International Red Cross Commentary on the Geneva Conventions:

Every person in enemy hands must have some status under international law: he is either a prisoner of war and, as such, covered by the Third [POW] Convention, [or] a civilian covered by the Fourth Convention.... There is no intermediate status; nobody in enemy hands can fall outside the law.

Separation and Sensory Deprivation

One questioner took on the topic of the "Separation" technique. Wasn't it the same as solitary confinement, and wasn't solitary confinement "banned by Common Article 3 in the affront to human dignity, other provisions? "Are you confident," a reporter asked, "that separation is permitted under Common Article 3?"

The Deputy Assistant Secretary of Defense for Detainee Affairs responded by denying that separation amounted to solitary confinement, even though the AFM describes the technique as, among other things "physical separation" "limited to 30 days of initial duration." Extensions for such physical separation must be reviewed and approved the General Officer or Flag Officer who initially approved the original "separation."

Kimmons' reply was even more disingenuous:

We have always segregated enemy combatants on the battlefield at the point of capture and beyond, to keep them silent, segregate the officers from the enlisted, the men from the women, and so forth. That's traditional; it goes back to World War II and beyond.

So, is "separation" a matter of segregating prisoners, or what? In the Army Field Manual itself, one gets that same kind of double talk. At first it is presented thus:

The purpose of separation is to deny the detainee the opportunity to communicate with other detainees in order to keep him from learning counter-resistance techniques or gathering new information to support a cover story; decreasing the detainee's resistance to interrogation.

This description sounds a lot like segregation for security purposes, although there is that phrase "decreasing the detainee's resistance." A page or so later, however, we find the following (emphasis added):

The use of separation should not be confused with the detainee-handling techniques approved in Appendix D [Guide for Handling Detainees]. Specifically, the use of segregation during prisoner handling (Search, Silence, Segregate, Speed, Safeguard, and Tag [5 S's and a T]) should not be confused with the use of separation as a restricted interrogation technique.

Furthermore, we learn that "separation" requires an interrogation plan, and medical and legal review, as well, of course, as "physical separation." If this is not solitary confinement for the purposes of breaking a prisoner down for interrogation, then the English language has lost all purpose in explaining things.

Another line of questioning took on the AFM's contention that it banned sensory deprivation. The entire exchange at the September 6 hearing is worth reproducing here. It represents, among other things, the most thorough line of inquiry I have seen by any reporter in quite some time. The following quote contains added emphases.

Q General, as an expert in interrogations, do you believe that sensory deprivation was abusive, or did it ever prove to be helpful in interrogation?

GEN. KIMMONS: Sensory deprivation is abusive and it's prohibited in this Field Manual, and it's absolutely counterproductive, in my understanding of what we have used productively. Sensory deprivation, just to be clear -- and we define it in the Field Manual, but basically, it comes down to the almost complete deprivation of all sensory stimuli, light, noise, and so forth, and to the point where it can have an adverse mental, psychological effect on a -- disorienting effect on a detainee.

Q So could there be deprivation of light alone for extended periods of time, as opposed to complete sensory deprivation?

GEN. KIMMONS: I think the total loss of an external stimulus, such as deprivation of light, would not fit what we have described here as -- for example, if you're hinting about separation, separation does not involve the darkness or lack of that type of sensory stimulation.

Q That wasn't the question, though. Would sensory -- would the deprivation of light alone be permitted under the current manual, as opposed -- because you described sensory deprivation as total deprivation --

GEN. KIMMONS: That's correction.

Q -- of all senses. So deprivation of light alone for extended periods would be permitted?

GEN. KIMMONS: I don't think the Field Manual explicitly addresses it.

It does not make it prohibited. And it would have to be weighed in the context of the overall environment. If it was at nighttime during sleep hours, then it would make personal sense to turn the lights off.

Q You know what I'm talking about. I'm trying to get at -- because you said specifically total sensory deprivation -- so deprivation of any one sense might be permitted. Like light, for example. They could be kept in the dark for extended periods of time beyond the usual nighttime hours.

This is really too specific and challenging for the DoD briefers, and they turn on their double-talk machine:

MR. STIMSON: Jim, questions like this are good questions to ask. And what's important to remember is that interrogation plans are put together for a reason so that not just one person can decide what he or she wants to do and then run off and do it. They're vetted. It's laid out how they're vetted. General Kimmons could go into that in exhaustive detail. Typically, there would be a JAG, as I understand it, General Kimmons --

GEN. KIMMONS: That's correct.

MR. STIMSON: -- that would have to review that. It goes up through various chains of command. And so, you know, types of questions like this would have to be asked and then vetted through that process.

Burying the Story

With all the hard questioning by the press, you'd think the issues would have been aired in the media in the days and weeks following the introduction of the Army Field Manual. As should be evident by now, that's not what happened.

Here's how the L.A. Times covered it (9/6/06), getting the story exactly backwards (emphasis added):

Bowing to critics of its tough interrogation policies, the Pentagon is issuing a new Army field manual that provides Geneva Convention protections for all detainees and eliminates a secret list of interrogation tactics.

The manual, set for release today, also reverses an earlier decision to maintain two interrogation standards – one for traditional prisoners of war and another for “unlawful combatants” captured during a conflict but not affiliated with a nation’s military force.

There is no mention of Appendix M or any controversy over techniques. Jumana Musa, an "advocacy director for Amnesty International, is quoted as noting, "“If the new field manual embraces the Geneva Convention, it is an important return to the rule of law.'"

The 9/7/06 article in the Washington Post was, if anything, even more laudatory of the new AFM:

Pentagon officials yesterday repudiated the harsh interrogation tactics adopted since the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, specifically forbidding U.S. troops from using forced nudity, hooding, military dogs and waterboarding to elicit information from detainees captured in ongoing wars.

The Defense Department simultaneously embraced international humane treatment standards for all detainees in U.S. military custody, the first time there has been a uniform standard for both enemy prisoners of war and the so-called unlawful combatants linked to al-Qaeda, the Taliban and other terrorist organizations.

The article falsely claims the AFM bans manipulation of sleep patterns. Regarding any controversy, the article explains:

Three expanded techniques -- good cop, bad cop; pretending to be an official from another country; and detention in a separate cell from others -- are allowed but require approval from senior officers. Officials originally considered keeping those three techniques classified but decided to make them public for the sake of full transparency.

The Post article also briefly mentions the generally positive response of human rights groups:

"This is the Pentagon coming full circle," said Tom Malinowski, Washington advocacy director for Human Rights Watch. "This is very strong guidance."

As for the human rights organizations, Amnesty International later essentially signed off on the AFM. In an article from the Winter 2007 issue of Amnesty International Magazine, Jumana Musa, quoted in the L.A. Times article above, had this to say about the new AFM:

AIUSA also worked with U.S. representatives and senators to introduce legislation to create a single, transparent standard for interrogations and to limit the CIA to approved interrogation techniques outlined in the Army Field Manual.

In a telephone interview for this article, Mr. Malinowski said he supported using the Army Field Manual as a replacement for the CIA "enhanced interrogation techniques," and described the question of abuse in Appendix M as not entirely clear. The language in Appendix M was "ambiguous," and open to criticism due to a "lack of clarity." He maintained, however, that using the current Army Field Manual as a model was merely a beginning, and that a new overhaul of interrogation techniques was on the agenda.

A call made to Amnesty International's press contact regarding this issue, and an e-mail sent to Jumana Musa, were both unreturned.

Conclusion

Two conclusions can be drawn from the above examination of the "selling" of the Army Field Manual to the American public in the late summer of 2006 and beyond. One is that reporters on the beat were very aware of the origins and implications of the issues surrounding Geneva and the AFM, and the controversies surrounding the use of isolation and other techniques under the rubric of "Separation." The extremely muted or non-existent discussion in the mainstream press of these issues after the AFM was introduced means that a decision to suppress these issues was made at an editorial level, and were not the result of laziness or dilatory reporting on behalf of reporters.

Secondly, the role of some human rights organizations in promoting the new Army Field Manual -- in particular, the actions of Amnesty International and Human Rights Watch -- are curious, to say the least. Press reports and the interview with Malinowski show that inclusion of certain human rights organizations in the vetting of the AFM started at the very beginning. We may not be able to find out what went on in the editorial offices of the nation's top newspapers, but we should know more about the discussions within the human rights organizations on how they advised, or were fooled, by talks with Bush administration and Pentagon personnel.

Meanwhile, other human rights organizations, such as the Nobel Prize-winning Physicians for Human Rights, have criticized the language and techniques described in Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, and called for rescission of the offending text. In a letter to Secretary of Defense Robert Gates in May 2007, Leonard S. Rubenstein, Executive Director of PHR, and retired Brigadier General Stephen N. Xenakis, MD, former Commanding General of the Southeast Regional U.S. Army Medical Command, wrote:

The new Army Field Manual on human intelligence gathering... explicitly prohibits several SERE-based techniques, yet Appendix M of the manual explicitly permits what amounts to isolation, along with sleep and sensory deprivation. The manual is silent on a number of other SERE-based methods, creating ambiguity and doubt over their place in interrogation doctrine....

PHR, therefore, respectfully urges you to take the following actions:

1. Fully implement the OIG’s recommendation to “preclude the use of Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape physical and psychological coercion techniques” in all interrogations. (Id, pp. 29-30.) This includes rescission of Appendix M of the new Army Field Manual and specific prohibition, by name, of each of the known SERE-based methods and their equivalents.

It seems likely that the Army Field Manual, whether by executive order (most likely) or by legislation, will become the new "single standard" for U.S. interrogation. Press reports hint that the Obama administration may yet allow a loophole for CIA interrogators. I don't know how that will sit with the many military lawyers and officers who have been instrumental in opposing Bush/Rumsfeld's torture policies from the beginning. I'm thinking of people like Alberto Mora and Antonio Taguba, or the new nominee for DoD General Counsel, Jeh Charles Johnson, who apparently intends to seriously change the policies set by his predecessor, Jim Haynes.

In any case, the full history and controversy behind torture and U.S. interrogation policy deserves a full airing. What happened, for instance, between June and September 2006, allowing for Pentagon acceptance of the Appendix M abusive procedures? When it comes to the implementation of a host of torture and cruel, inhumane interrogation techniques by the U.S. government, both an investigation and prosecutions are needed.

It will be a challenge for our society to bring out the full story, while also bringing to justice those individuals who broke both domestic law and international treaty. We will need both investigations and prosecutions in order settle scores with the past, to understand where we stand now, and what we need to change to move forward.

Obscurity Blankets Certain Anti-Torture Moves

Josh Gerstein at Politico has ably described the important shortcomings one finds in President Obama's Executive Orders issued yesterday to close Guantanamo and end torture. While the CIA is disallowed from using waterboarding and other "enhanced" torture techniques, and forced to adhere to the standards (flawed as they are) of the Army Field Manual; and while the CIA is forced now to close their secret black site prisons; and while Guantanamo itself is to be close "promptly... within a year", there are some troublesome problems remaining.

Not least is the problem with the Army Field Manual itself. Some former Bush administration figures and CIA types see the AFM as insufficient to guide their interrogation actions in the field. They want the ability to improvise their techniques to the given interrogation or situation. Many of these same people are implying that Obama's moves to close Guantanamo raises the spectre of the release of horrible terrorists in the homeland itself, who will attack American communities. In a column today, Glenn Greenwald dissects this fear-mongering campaign by the right.


Others, like myself, see the AFM as abusive in and of itself. The inclusion of Appendix M, and other procedures allowed by that document, means that use of techniques such as isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, inducing fear and humiliation of prisoners is still allowed. These techniques, especially when used in combination, which is what the AFM suggests, certainly amount to cruel, inhumane and degrading behavior (in contradistinction to Geneva rules), if not torture itself.

Josh Gerstein emphasizes a now much-examined aspect of the language of the executive order on interrogations:

[The] order also created an interagency commission which will have six months to examine whether to create “additional or different guidance” for non-military agencies such as the CIA. One group that represents detainees, the Center for Constitutional Rights, deemed that an “escape hatch” to potentially allow enhanced interrogations in the future.

White House counsel Greg Craig told reporters such fears are misplaced. “This is not an invitation to bring back different techniques than those that are approved inside the Army Field Manual, but an invitation to this task force to make recommendations as to whether or not there should be a separate protocol that's more appropriate to the intelligence community,” he said....

“For now, they’re punting, saying they’ll comply with what’s in the Army manual…but at some point in the future this commission may revert to the executive” to recommend harsher techniques, said [Yale law school lecturer, and attorney for Guantanamo prisoner Ahmed Zuhair, Ramzi] Kassem, adding that he was concerned about how transparent the commission’s recommendations would be.

Gerstein has other caveats, as well. For one thing, the man ultimately in charge of Guantanamo in the last few years for Bush, Secretary of State Robert Gates, is also the man now in charge of re-examining whether conditions there meet "humane standards of confinement." His findings will be interesting for yet another reason. As Gerstein points out, Guantanamo prisoners still suffer from isolation and force feeding.

According to detainee lawyers, about two dozen inmates who refuse to eat as a form of protest are currently being force fed, and about 140 are in some form of solitary confinement....

As far as we know, the force feeding and solitary practices continued onto Obama’s watch. Craig dodged a question about the new president’s views on those issues. “I'm not going to get into the details,” Craig said.

As I and others have noted, Obama's executive orders say nothing about other U.S. prisoners held in Baghram (about 600), and the tens of thousands held in Iraq. Nor does the halt in the military commissions mean there won't be a return to some form of ersatz trial body in the near future.

That suggestion exasperates detainee lawyers like Kassem. “That would be a huge mistake, “ he said. “That system [is] set up to launder statements obtained through torture… What’s the point of getting rid of our offshore, improvised, sham, military tribunals in Cuba, only to recreate it here in the United States?”

The Center for Constitutional Rights has called for trying prisoners (who can be charged) in ordinary criminal courts.

The new administration must repatriate those who can be released safely, secure safe haven in the United States and other countries for those who cannot be repatriated safely, and prosecute in federal criminal courts those who should be prosecuted. Only 250 of 779 men remain in the prison camp. Most can be returned to their home countries through vigorous diplomacy. A smaller number need to be offered protection in the United States or third countries, many of whom have already begun to come forward to offer help to the new administration. There is no justification for continued detention without trial or the creation of special courts; such proposals would continue the human rights disaster rather than end it.

A number of political forces are circling around the torture interrogations issue. Senator Dianne Feinstein has apparently decided that Obama's executive order is not secure as policy, and declared she will go forward with legislation to "codify" the change to the Army Field Manual, making it less likely it can be overturned by further executive actions.

While Feinstein may see this as a progressive step, I see it as a danger, in that the abusive techniques left in the Army Field Manual will be perpetuated.

Much struggle still remains in the fight against torture. This next period will see a heightening of that struggle. One thing remains clear: we must not let the discussions and battles over it creep back into backroom corridors and out of public awareness. Hopefully, Obama's wish for greater openness, and his recent efforts to strengthen access to presidential records and government documents in general, through the Freedom of Information Act, will assist us in this effort. But the main tool of change will remain public awareness and public vigilance.

PHR Praises (Critically) Obama's Executive Order on Torture

Whenever I find myself getting too negative, or on the contrary, being unreasonably optimistic and not attending to important information, I can count on the very reasonable and knowledgeable folks at Physicians for Human Rights to set me back on the right course.

This is the feeling I got once again when I read their press release today on President Obama's Executive Orders ending the illegal U.S. detention and interrogation program. While I have emphasized in previous posts my concerns about the what has been left out of Obama's reforms, or places where the torture cancer remains untouched or lies dormant, PHR takes a balanced approach, approving of important changes regarding torture and interrogations from the Bush years, and looking forward to the needed changes still necessary to return to this country to completely civilized status.

What follows is today's PHR press release:

For Immediate Release: Jan. 22, 2009

Contact: Nathaniel Raymond
617-413-6407
nraymond@phrusa.org

PHR Praises President Obama's Executive Orders Ending Illegal US Detention and Interrogation Program; Accountability for Perpetrators of Torture Still Needed

Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) praises President Obama for signing historic executive orders today that end the US' illegal detention and interrogation program, marking a clear departure from the abuses of the past administration and a return to the rule of law.

"PHR applauds President Obama's swift action to reclaim America's legacy as a nation committed to the rule of law," said Frank Donaghue, Chief Executive Officer of PHR. "The reforms enacted today represents a victory for human rights and a blow against the use of torture."

Despite today's major progress, additional work remains to be done. PHR calls on President Obama and Congress to immediately authorize a non-partisan commission to investigate the authorization, legal justification, and implementation of the Bush Administration's regime of psychological and physical torture. Any accountability mechanism must include a subgroup tasked with investigating the participation of health professionals in detainee abuse. Additionally, any evidence that U.S. officials violated anti-torture law should be turned over to the Department of Justice.

"The desire to turn the page on the past seven years of detainee abuse and torture by US forces is understandable," Donaghue said. "However, President Obama, Congress and the health professions will not have fulfilled their obligation to the Constitution and medical ethics if we settle only for reform without accountability."

PHR urges the Obama Administration to end the use of Behavioral Science Consultants (BSCs) in interrogations. The continued use of BSCs violates medical ethics and subverts the traditions of the healing professions. Any procedures currently in place involving health professionals in interrogations which violate medical ethics should be prohibited.

"The past administration's weaponization of the health professions to inflict harm on detainees constitutes a war crime unto itself," said Donaghue. "Despite all that has been disclosed so far about abuses committed by health professionals, many questions remain, chief among them is whether there will be any accountability for gross violations of medical ethics and the law."

Additionally, PHR also calls on the task force appointed by the president to review US interrogation and transfer policies to revoke Appendix M of the Army Field Manual. This section allows the use of sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and isolation—tactics which can constitute torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment under U.S. and international law. PHR encourages the task force to consult with human rights organizations as part of the review process.

Physicians for Human Rights mobilizes the health profession to advance the health and dignity of all people by protecting human rights. As a founding member of the International Campaign to Ban Landmines, PHR shared the 1997 Nobel Peace Prize. For more information, please visit us at physiciansforhumanrights.org.

Confusion in the Press on Torture Plans

An Associated Press story by Lara Jakes and Pamela Hess, released last Friday, reports on President Obama's intention to limit the CIA to interrogation techniques listed in the Army Field Manual. The pending Executive Orders on interrogation would also end the practice of detention by the CIA in secret prisons.(Not pending anymore, see link.) But, in a potential sop to the Agency:

[Obama's] advisers are considering adding a classified loophole to the rules that could allow the CIA to use some interrogation methods not specifically authorized by the Pentagon...

Such a "loophole" would be included as a classified annex to the Army Field Manual, which the article assures us doesn't allow threats or coercion, while also banning physical abuse and outrageous torture techniques like waterboarding. The article does single out, without explanation, that there is a special AFM technique allowed "in some cases" -- isolation.

Without knowing it, and not knowing the history of the writing of the Army Field Manual, or possibly forgetting it, or maybe suppressing it, the AP reporters misrepresent that document. There already was a controversy over adding a classified annex to the AFM -- over three years ago. That controversy ended with the publication of disputed techniques of interrogation in an unclassified appendix to the Army Field Manual (Appendix M, "Separation"). That appendix includes descriptions of coercive psychological torture techniques, including isolation, sleep deprivation, sensory/perceptual deprivation, as well as others that are included in the manual proper (such as "Fear Up" and "Ego Down" [humiliation]). These techniques are most harmful when combined together, and are similar to those used by the Stalinist countries and the Nazis to break men down. They are also similar if not identical to the main techniques of coercive interrogation and torture advocated for use by the CIA in its KUBARK interrogation manual of the early 1960s. (See this link for fuller explanation.)

With all the double talk and off-again, on-again secrecy about interrogation techniques, one shouldn't blame the AP reporters for their confusion. But they owe it to their readers to get the story right. Here's one example of that confusion:

The military rejected adding a classified annex to the manual before it was published in 2006 because it believed having two sets of rules could confuse soldiers and reasoned that the classified techniques would quickly become known once those interrogated were released.

But, if they would have only read the current Army Field Manual, they would have seen that two sets of rules already apply, and that Appendix M techniques are only for use on "unlawful enemy combatants."

The threat once more to add a classified annex of more coercive techniques serves two purposes. One, it satisfies those CIA officers who want the freedom to improvise more coercive forms of torture in the field. It also gives interrogators leverage in promoting the most basic factor in breaking down prisoners, fear, as a detainee can feel unsure just what kind of torture will be thrown at him. Worry, anxiety and fear work harder on a person's mind and body than an actual physical punishment, as a person can learn to endure the latter, or come to feel the worst has been experienced. But then I don't have to tell everybody this; it's all there, discussed in length by the CIA in its KUBARK document.

Secondly, the threat to add more coercive techniques to the AFM works as a cover for the fact that there are already abusive procedures in that document that amount to psychological torture. bmaz at Emptywheel/Firedoglake makes the point regards the latter in a recent posting, noting that Judge Susan Crawford at Guantanamo very recently described the combination of "legal" procedures upon prisoner Mohammad al-Qahtani as "torture." I would question Judge Crawford's opinion that most of these techniques were legal, but they were certainly commonly used upon prisoners, and did amount to torture. Most of those techniques are allowed in the current AFM. Some of them are not, i.e., the use of working dogs or stress positions. But just because the latter are removed doesn't mean the core KUBARK program of isolation and sleep deprivation and fear/humiliation doesn't remain.

Therefore, should the trial balloon over a special "loophole," or "classified annex" for CIA interrogation techniques should fail to pass Congressional or public muster, there is always Appendix M to fall back on, ignored in all the hubbub over some new secret techniques. This is the art of using the "Overton window", which the former administration had practiced with great mastery. One would have hoped such forms of shaping public discourse would have been abandoned in this new administration of proclaimed transparency. But I guess when it comes to CIA and military interrogation something less than full openness is preferred.

Still, it's good to see that not everybody is buying the entire package, as proven by dday's comments on Appendix M at digby's blog, Hullabaloo, today.

In general, torture and interrogation are tough stuff to read about, and the natural inclination to look away works to keep the public in a state of ignorance, the better to be fooled. Reporters rely too much on government press releases and briefings, and translate government spin into received wisdom, which is then transferred to their readers, and so the parameters of public discourse become set. In this sense, Jakes and Hess are not singled out for particularly bad reporting, as they are typical of their peers in this sense, of accepting military or CIA explanations for how things are, and not digging deeper.

Obama is to be congratulated for wanting to close Guantanamo, hold the CIA to non-abusive forms of interrogation, and in general trying to return the world of interrogation and military detention to a semblance of obeisance to international lawful standards. But there are a lot of questions about Obama's policy still on the agenda, and a lot of pressure coming from what we might call "interested parties." What will Obama's position be on extraordinary rendition? What about the hundreds, if not thousands, of prisoners held in the U.S. "war on terror" in other U.S. prisons, such as Baghram?

The public must call for no special loophole for the CIA on the matter of interrogations. They must also call for the removal of Appendix M and abusive techniques like "Fear Up" before giving any pass to Obama's call for changes in interrogation. Otherwise, we will have done not much more than put lipstick on a pig. (Now where have I heard that one before?)

Update: The same threat to add coercive procedures to the otherwise supposedly sanitized AFM is repeated in today's AP story by Ben Feller, reporting on Obama's signing of executive orders that will lead to the eventual closing of Guantanamo, a shut-down of CIA prisons, an affirmation to the right of habeas corpus by detainees, and an end to the CIA's use of "enhanced interrogation techniques". From now on the CIA will have to rely on the Army Field Manual techniques. While this will aggravate the agents in the field, it will still leave much leeway for certain traditional CIA forms of interrogation, as described above.


Obama's changes are in general positive. But they do not go far enough, and the status of what exactly will be changed, as in the case of future adjudication of the Guantanamo prisoners, or how "terror suspects" will be handled in the months or years to come, await the conclusion of review task forces. The latter are headed by the main administration bureaucracy at State, Defense, and the intelligence agencies, and coordinated by the Attorney General. Their trustworthiness is yet to be determined, and in some cases these people are already known and not very untrustworthy, given their support of the Iraq War, or over-identification with intelligence and covert operations.

Isn't it funny that no one thinks that it would be a good idea to have some on the spot oversight by human rights groups? Obama has strengthened the Freedom of Information Act as a tool of non-governmental oversight. But why is there not input in these "task forces" by prominent human rights groups or individuals? What's even more remarkable is that no one even sees fit to ask.

Help Support Ravaged Gaza Community Health Center

H/T Stephen Soldz

Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR) urges our members and friends to contribute to the Gaza Community Mental Health Project, a new PsySR fundraising campaign to support the Gaza Community Mental Health Program (GCMHP), which has suffered extensive damage to its headquarters at a time of escalating demand for its services.

To Donate Now: http://www.psysr.org/gaza

Psychologists for Social Responsibility joins with other advocates of peace, social justice, and human rights in calling for an immediate, concerted, and unrelenting effort to end the devastating violence and the tragic humanitarian crisis in Gaza.

As an organization focused on psychology’s contributions to positive social change, PsySR is also painfully aware of the profound psychological impact of the aerial and ground assault on the individuals, families, and communities of Gaza. Several important short-term and long-term psychological consequences of living in a war zone - which undoubtedly describes Gaza today - are now well-documented. They include the following:

* Psychological distress in war zones is often as great as the physical suffering that receives more widespread attention. For some, including children, coping with issues of family separation, multiple losses, and bereavement can be even more unbearable than other health-related concerns.

* The adverse psychological effects of first-hand exposure to the horrors of war are often exacerbated by pre-existing conditions. People already under stress before an attack -from severe poverty, chronic exposure to harsh imposed restrictions, and past bloodshed - are likely to have stronger and more overwhelming reactions to violence.

* Prolonged fears of attack, powerful feelings of helplessness, and deep worries about family and community heighten the damaging psychological effects - such as depression and PTSD - of life-threatening events and can contribute to ongoing cycles of violence.

* The magnitude of psychological suffering in war zones is determined not only by exposure to life-threatening events but also by people’s immediate and continuing access to individual and family supports, along with broader efforts that are locally, culturally, and psychologically-informed.

Ultimately, a just and lasting peace and a brighter future for Palestinians and Israelis alike will require that these psychological consequences and considerations also receive serious and sustained attention.

It is within this context that the recently reported massive damage to the headquarters of the Gaza Community Mental Health Program is particularly distressing. With a special emphasis on vulnerable groups such as children, women, and victims of torture and human rights violations, the GCMHP’s staff provides crucial and irreplaceable mental health services to thousands of Gaza residents. These services will be even more broadly and desperately needed in the days and months immediately ahead. Throughout its history, the GCMHP has also been firmly committed to nonviolent resistance and to working for a world where Palestinians and Israelis can live together in peace.

In recognition of these urgent circumstances, PsySR has initiated a fundraising campaign to provide support to the Gaza Community Mental Health Program as it rebuilds and adapts to meet escalating needs. The GCMHP receives funding from a consortium of the Norwegian, Swedish, and Danish governments, but that funding is specifically targeted for programs favored by the consortium. For years, independent groups such as the Gaza Mental Health Foundation in the U.S. and Physicians for Human Rights-Israel, have provided independent funding that can be used more flexibly. Our initiative will supplement these efforts in this time of heightened need.

Organizing help for the GCMHP is one way that we, as psychologists and mental health providers, can counter the despair and hopelessness bred in all parties by this renewed outbreak of seemingly irresolvable violence. In so doing, we make a statement in support of human rights, mutual recognition and security, and pathway to the reconciliation that must underlie a sustainable peace in this region.

We strongly encourage other organizations and individuals to join us in this effort. Today through March 1st, tax-deductible contributions can be made online through our website at http://www.psysr.org/gaza or by check made out to “Grassroots International” (please write “GCMHP” in the memo line) and mailed to PsySR’s national headquarters: PsySR, 208 “I” Street NE, Washington, DC 20002.

All donations will be processed through Grassroots International, which has received a four-star rating from independent charity evaluator Charity Navigator, and its online partner Democracy in Action. For more information, please email our Project Coordinators at gazamentalhealth@psysr.org or contact PsySR’s executive director Colleen Cordes by phone at 202-543-5347.

PsySR gratefully acknowledges Psychoanalysts for Social Responsibility and our other coalition partners in this fundraising campaign.

To Donate Now: http://www.psysr.org/gaza

Big Brother Is Here... Officially! NSA Spying on Everyone

Last October I briefly discussed an ABC interview with two National Security Agency whistleblowers, Adrienne Kinne and David Murfee Faulk. ABC's Brian Ross reported that the NSA eavesdropped on "hundreds of Americans simply calling their families."

Tonight, former National Security Agency analyst, Russell Tice, was interviewed on the Keith Olbermann show. Tice revealed that the NSA spying has been far greater than revealed before. Essentially, NSA has been spying on everyone's computer traffic, phone calls, faxes, emails, etc. Furthermore, this spying was also targeted at specific domestic groups, including reporters.

This outrageous all-out assault on the Fourth Amendment and our civil liberties is a tremendous threat to all of us. We must demand an immediate end to this program, and investigation and prosecution of those who initiated and ran this illegal program. The ability to use this information to persecute political opponents is a dire threat to our country, and a knife in the heart of any pretense to democracy.

RiderOnTheStorm has a good, understandable technical breakdown of the details at a diary at Daily Kos:

Mr. Tice talked at some length about the difference between large-scale technical surveillance and more focused directed surveillance. If I've understood him correctly, then I think I can explain what he was talking about by using email as an example.

If you were interested in screening huge amounts of email, but didn't have the capacity to capture or store it all, you might decide to just content yourself with the metadata. Metadata is just "data about data". For instance, in the case of email, some interesting metadata might be: (a) what language it's in (b) the sender's address (c) the recipient's address (d) the length in bytes (e) the length in lines (f) what kinds of attachments, if any (g) what mail program was used to compose it (h) what the Subject line was, and so on.

This sort of metadata is relatively easy to extract and takes up a lot less room than the actual data: the metadata for an email message with 2M of photos attached might fit in 1K. (And this is the point where it should dawn on you that similar metadata exists for faxes, phone calls, and every other electronic form of communication.)

Metadata can be useful. Suppose you know that The Bad Guy always uses Eudora 1.1 to compose mail messages and always attaches photos that are 772x448 pixels in JPG format. If you've extracted the right metadata from billions of messages, you might be able to figure out that the 99.999% of them aren't what you're looking for by using that as a filter. If you're lucky, the only messages left will be the ones you want -- or the number will be small enough that brute force or maybe a simple search will get you what you want.

But metadata can be abused. It's possible to use the same collection to reconstruct
the salient details of every message sent by A. Or from A to B. Or which has a "Subject:" line containing the string "protest". And so on. It enables ad hoc fishing expeditions that are limited only by the scope of the collection, the kind of metadata extracted -- and the restraint of those conducting them, which I think we can safely characterize as "nonexistent".

If I understood Mr. Tice correctly, metadata collection was untargeted and pervasive.
They went for everything they could get. Which means if you sent a message to Aunt Mary with a photo of the dog on July 17, 2004, they acquired -- or at least tried to acquire -- the metadata for it.

Mr. Tice's further point was that high-level technical analysis like this was used to select specific targets for detailed analysis -- and in that detailed analysis, EVERYTHING was collected. Not just metadata: everything. Every phone call, every fax, every email, every instant message, everything. All captured and stored in a database...somewhere.

Implications?

This so much worse than what we knew at this time last year that I hardly know where to begin. Let me just recapitulate part of what Mr. Tice said: he stated that he'd been asked to identify particular groups so that they could be excluded from surveillance...but eventually he realized that this was an internal NSA cover story, and that those were precisely the groups being targeted. It took him a while to get around to naming one of those groups, but when he did...journalists. Reporters. The news media.

Here's a link to the MSNBC site that has the interview for online viewing.

Update (from the interview):

OLBERMANN: Let's start with the review. We heard the remarks from Mr. Bush in 2005, that only Americans who would have been eavesdropped on without a warrant were those who were talking to terrorists overseas. Based on what you know, what you have seen firsthand and what you have encountered in your experience, how much of that statement was true?

TICE: Well, I don't know what our former president knew or didn't know. I'm sort of down in the weeds. But the National Security Agency had access to all Americans' communications, faxes, phone calls, and their computer communications. And that doesn't -- it didn't matter whether you were in Kansas, you know, in the middle of the country, and you never made a communication -- foreign communications at all. They monitored all communications.

I'll end with this from mcjoan, also at Daily Kos:

The questions we had then are now tripled: Who was targeted and why? When did this program begin? What exactly was behind the NSA's efforts to enlist Qwest in warrantless wiretaps in February, 2001--months before 9/11, and what other telcos did they approach at that time, and to what purpose? That's just scratching the surface of questions that need to be asked, and it's about fucking time we get some answers. And that the FISA Amendment Act that legalized so many of these abuses, including bulk collection of data, be repealed.

Obama's Executive Orders on Guantanamo and the Question of Prosecutions

+++ Update: Here's a link to the draft executive order's text +++

Like attacking a hydra with many heads, the new administration is planning to take its first whacks at the torture regime set up by the Bush Administration. It's most infamous manifestation lies 90 miles off the U.S. coast at Guantanamo Naval Base, Cuba.

Today, the government ordered a 120-day suspension of the military tribunal hearings of the Guantanamo detainees, as well as lesser delays in habeas hearings filed by attorneys on behalf of some of the prisoners.

Now, breaking news reported at ABC News, reports that tomorrow we will see three executive orders issued by President Obama aimed at the closure of Guantanamo "within a year", and promising immediate changes in the procedures and policies surrounding interrogation of detainees, and the conditions of their detention.

The ABC article is vague on whether the CIA will be included as regards changes in interrogation policies.

It is unlikely, but possible, that the new administration would in the first week expressly prohibit some interrogation techniques or refer to new legal parameters for the CIA program.

Of late, legislation has been introduced into Congress that would hold all U.S. interrogations, including those held by the CIA, to guidelines established in the Army Field Manual. The recent version of the manual is, despite assurances by former Bush administration, Pentagon, and some human rights officials, seriously flawed, allowing for solitary confinement/isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, and manipulation and creation of fears, among other coercive interrogation techniques. Physicians for Human Rights and The Constitution Project have both called for serious revision to the manual.

The Executive Director for Center for Constitutional Rights, Vincent Warren, was quick to respond to news of the proposed executive order to close Guantanamo. (CCR has been the central organization in organizing the defense of the Guantanamo detainees, gathering over 400 pro bono attorneys from all over the U.S. to help represent them.

"It only took days to put these men in Guantanamo, it shouldn't take a year to get them out.

We are proud that President Obama made addressing Guantanamo one of his first acts in office. Yet we are disappointed that he outlined no concrete steps for closing the base and gave his administration an entire year to sort out its plans - meaning that some men could have been detained indefinitely in terrible conditions for eight full years. Surely he could do better.

President Obama should commit to dismantling the military commissions, not just suspending them, and to prosecuting any cases before federal criminal courts - real courts with real laws."

A lot of the discussion about closing Guantanamo has to do with the disposition of its prisoners, how or where they would be tried, where they would go if released, etc. Outside of these important questions, the existence of these men, many or most of them who have been tortured, held without rights, is an embarrassment and an accusation against the system that kidnapped many of them and then held them incommunicado for years, with no right of redress, without charges, without hope. They were held in abusive conditions that amount to psychological torture. Many of them were tortured under interrogation.

Despite some recent releases, there are over 240 prisoners still languishing at Guantanamo, and over 600 at Baghram Air Base in Afghanistan. A true accounting of the number of prisoners held by the military and CIA is not available.

What do the proposed executive orders from Obama portend? Until we see the final drafts, it may be presumptuous to say. But while they mark a real change from the policies of the Bush administration, it is not clear how far they will really go. Will the CIA be forced to give up their "enhanced interrogation techniques", i.e., their right really to do what they damn well please when they interrogate prisoners, up to and including torture (even if they swear they never torture, that waterboarding, for instance, is not torture, etc.)? What procedures are proposed for the closure of Guantanamo? Will habeas be fully restored? Will isolation as a matter of policy, and other abusive procedures at Guantanamo be ended? What will be the standard for interrogation? Will the military commissions be ended?

The Prosecutions Issue

The story of the unraveling of the torture network built by Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, the CIA and others, will take place in the light of an ongoing push by many for prosecutions of Bush administration officials for torture. Obama has indicated he is not disposed to pursue such prosecution. It's possible, as the ACLU has proposed, that ongoing investigations left over from the spate of Bush WH scandals will metamorphosize into something bigger, a large scale investigation into wrong-doing by the administration or the Pentagon/CIA.

Hence, according to the New York Times:

Obama is facing even more intense pressure from liberal, human-rights and civil-liberties groups to allow some kind of investigation into the Bush administration's terrorism policies.

Chris Anders, senior legislative counsel at the American Civil Liberties Union, said it would be a simple matter to start such an inquiry because the Justice Department's special prosecutor, John Durham, is already investigating whether the CIA acted illegally when it destroyed videotapes of its harsh interrogations. Anders said Durham's mandate could be expanded to look into whether the interrogations depicted on the tapes were illegal.

Most recently, according to a Reuters report earlier this month, Durham stated in a court filing that his probe of the CIA destruction of videotapes of the "harsh" interrogations of Abu Zubaydah and Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri was nearing an end. "A considerable portion" of the work is now done, but some witnesses still need to be interviewed. (Link to Durham's filing)

Durham made the court filing as part of a FOIA lawsuit by the James Madison Project requesting a release of the documents associated with the tapes destruction. The CIA had asked the court for a delay until February 28, the latest date Durham states his investigation will be finished. According to Secrecy News, a section of the website for Federation of American Scientists:

Key details of the pending criminal investigation have been redacted from Mr. Durham’s affidavit, including the number of witnesses interviewed and the volume of documents examined to date....

Mr. Durham noted that “in many instances,” delays have resulted from witness requests for legal representation and the need to get witness attorneys cleared. In some cases, the government officials involved have retired and have been “read out” of the highly compartmented intelligence programs in question, and it has taken additional time to have their credentials reinstated, he said.

Expanding the Durham investigation seems like a long-shot, but who knows what will be in that FOIA release when it finally comes? The bulk of the Democratic leadership is surely afraid of what an investigation might bring, due to reports of the complicity of some of the Democratic leadership, particularly Nancy Pelosi, Jane Harman and Jay Rockerfeller, in the approval of some of the torture program.

The next couple of months -- I never get tired of repeating -- will be key in the struggle to hold the torturers accountable, and to bring real, lasting change to the system that has brought the United States to the status of pariah nation by the use of torture, and by the cover-up of such use.

Obama Inaugruation: Beyond Words, We Wait for Deeds

The inauguration of the first U.S. president with African ancestry is a very deeply emotional day for millions of Americans. History will show whether this represents the turning point in the centuries-long oppression of black people in this country, or of people of color in general, or not. It will not be the symbol but the reality of such equal rights and opportunity that will count.

Meanwhile, the following words from President Obama's inauguration speech is greatly appreciated. As with so much else, we wait to see how such high-sounding words are implemented. But after eight years of dedication to torture and injustice, in the name of "saving" Americans, these were very welcome words indeed.

As for our common defense, we reject as false the choice between our safety and our ideals. Our Founding Fathers, faced with perils we can scarcely imagine, drafted a charter to assure the rule of law and the rights of man, a charter expanded by the blood of generations. Those ideals still light the world, and we will not give them up for expedience's sake.

The best way to demonstrate this rejection of such a terrible choice would be to show that Democracy is on the level, and no one is beyond the law, by prosecuting the war criminals who so lately held office in the United States government, as well as any that still inhabit the halls of the people.

Barack Obama was right to emphasize one important thing in his speech, that the responsibility to change things rests with us. Are we all up to tremendous deeds, to changing history?

Firedoglake Picks Up Army Field Manual Torture Story

Originally posted at Daily Kos

I was very grateful to see bmaz over at Firedoglake take up an issue I have been pushing very much at Daily Kos and elsewhere for the past few years. Really, my first big support on my opposition to using the Army Field Manual, as written, as a "single standard" for interrogations by the Pentagon and CIA, was by DKos front-pager Meteor Blades, picking up a story published by AlterNet, who also supported this story..

My objective in researching and reporting on the AFM issue was to change the public discourse about it, especially as Democrats had decided that the AFM was the perfect counterweight to the CIA's "enhanced interrogation methods." It was John McCain's idea to have the Pentagon and CIA hold to the AFM standards. But then Rumsfeld's office (or someone) ran an end run around him, rewrote the AFM, inserted techniques that amounted to psychological torture, and then battled with opponents over it for months, until finally the AFM was published the way Rumsfeld and his lieutenant, Stephen Cambone, wanted it.

Whatever the AFM was supposed to be, by September 2006 it wasn't that anymore, and not the press, or McCain, or even any bloggers were talking about it. Apparently there was an opposition from within the military, including military attorneys, and even some high officers, but they weren't going public with it, except to leak to the press. After September 2006, even those leaks stopped, possibly due to the political cave-in that was the passing of the Military Commissions Act.

There were two exceptions I was aware of, and one of them was myself. The other was Physicians for Human Rights, who opposed Appendix M from the beginning.

What is Appendix M? It is an addition to the Army Field Manual that allows for special interrogation techniques to be used against so-called "unlawful enemy combatants," such as the administration labeled the detainees at Guantanamo. In reality, the special techniques allow use of isolation/solitary confinement, sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, and arguably, other procedures similar to Guantanamo's hated "frequent flyer" torture program. As a result of the inclusion of these abusive technqiues, and others, I and others have stated that the AFM fails to meet the requirements of the Geneva conventions, the UN Convention Against Torture, the War Crimes Act, and other laws and treaties.

The AFM, as rewritten, includes problematic procedures even outside of Appendix M, including a rewrite of its use of the dubious technique of "Fear Up." Whereas in the earlier version of the AFM "Fear Up" allowed exploitation of the fear a prisoner might feel upon incarceration, the new version, which is in the main section of the manual, not Appendix M, allowed for the creation of "new" fears. The change was included in a clause of only a few words. In many ways, the AFM inclusion of torture is a classic case of the devil being in the details, or in the fine print, in this case.

bmaz's article picks up where mine left off by tying the kind of treatment advocated by the AFM to the torture endured by Mohammad al-Qahtani, otherwise known as Prisoner 063, whose interrogation logs made a sensational splash when published by Time Magazine a few years ago. The military interrogation of al-Qahtani amounted to torture, Susan Crawford, the convening authority to the military commissions, admitted to Bob Woodward in a bombshell interview the other day in the Washington Post.

Noting how Crawford emphasized the combination of interrogation techniques, most of them similar to those laid out in the current AFM's Appendix M, bmaz noted:

Crawford has exposed to bright sunlight the lie that is Barack Obama's, and other politicians', simple minded reliance on the Army Field Manual as cover for their torture reform credentials. Interrogators can stay completely within the Army manual and still be engaging in clear, unequivocal torture under national and international norms, laws and conventions....

The Army Field Manual provisions, especially with those pesky footnotes like "Appendix M", leave a wide open path for torture. And this is exactly what Susan Crawford directly admitted to Bob Woodward. This is a significant problem, the very torture, and modalities thereof, that are so abhorrent are about to be ratified and enshrined into the ethos of the new Obama Administration. What is worse is that the media and the country as a whole are biting off on the proposition that the torture regime is being slain in the process, and that is simply not the case.

bmaz notes that better people are soon to inhabit some of the posts within the Defense Department and other governmental agencies, and that they want to help change the former illegal policies. But he notes that issues like the current Army Field Manual and its Appendix M stand in the way of making these changes, and calls, as I do, for its removal.

It is very difficult to affect public discourse when the bulk of the mainstream media, politicians, human rights agencies, and even big-time political bloggers keep silent. To be honest, it makes one doubt one's sanity at times. That's why I want to give a big thanks of appreciation to bmaz (and the FDL crew) and Meteor Blades, for helping to push this issue forward. There are others behind the scenes who I know have supported this, and have kept me going, and I am very grateful to them, as well.

The AFM is only one piece of the larger picture regarding the torture project undertaken by the Bush administration, and it may not even be the most important piece. But I think the background story behind it may lead us to some very interesting places. And then, for the sake of those detainees currently held by U.S. forces in Guantanamo, Baghram, and U.S. prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention CIA "black site" prisons and prison ships, I could not stay silent when right in front of my eyes I saw the implementation of a torture program, albeit without some of the more unsavory and infamous techniques, like waterboarding and sexual humiliation. Probably, it was the elimination of these that kept many from seeing for a long time exactly what was actually wrong with the Army Field Manual.

I hope you are motivated to go read bmaz's excellent piece, and not because I am prominently mentioned in it. I think bmaz did an excellent job of drawing out the current significance of the issue and applying it to an important breaking story. That's what the truth does for you: it takes disparate pieces of information and throws a light upon it that draws out its true significance.

Onward and upward to prosecutions of those involved in the planning and implementation of torture by United States officials!

Sign Petition to Free Leonard Peltier

1851treaty.com is sponsoring a petition asking incoming president Barack Obama to pardon long-time political prisoner, Native American activist Leonard Peltier. (H/T Winter Rabbit)

Another petition is online asking for clemency for Mr. Peltier, who recently was transferred to yet another prison facility, farther away from his ancestral homeland.

From the second petition linked above:

Mr. Peltier was convicted for the June 26, 1975 murders of 2 FBI agents on the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation. There were 4 defendants originally charged before the Grand Jury. Two of the defendants were tried before the court and found Not Guilty by reason of self-defense.

Charges were dropped on the 3rd defendant. Mr. Peltier was tried after a change of venue to North Dakota. In this trial Mr. Peltier wasn't able to put up a self-defense argument. Any evidence that could have proven Mr. Palters' innocence was not allowed in his trial or if it was allowed it was not allowed in front of the jury. Witness testimony wildly diverged between Grand Jury testimony and trial testimony; further, several of the witnesses recanted their testimony after the trial, claiming perjured testimony because of threats from the FBI. Despite testimony, prosecuting attorneys have stated on several occasions that they don't know who shot the agents that day....

A few FBI officials and/or agents have launched campaigns to publicly proclaim the guilt of Mr. Peltier. Thus propitiating the original cover up through dissemination of misinformation in editorials, web sites and full page newspaper ads in what is seen as an effort to discredit the common sense and creditability of many national leaders and their organizations. These leaders have studied the case in-depth for over twenty-three years since the reign of terror on the Pine Ridge reservation and areas supposedly under the protection of this county.

Mr. President and elected officials of all people, we ask that you no longer ignore the voices of the 10's of millions of signatures and letters of the last twenty three years, and the results of the most recent polls in favor of his immediate release.

And from a recent letter from Mr. Peltier to his supporters:

They have at times called me a thug and a cold blooded murderer, but I know historically they called Geronimo a cold blooded murderer and savage, they called Crazy Horse a cold blooded murderer and savage, they called Captain Jack of the Modocs a cold blooded murderer and savage, they called Black Hawk of the Sauk a cold blooded murderer and savage, they called Tecumseh a cold blooded murderer and savage, they called Sitting Bull a cold blooded murderer and savage - and the list goes on and on.

The one thing all these men have in common is they were all imprisoned or killed by this government; they were all patriots in their own land, trying to stop the illegal immoral taking of their people's land and resources. They didn't call the men who murdered our people at Wounded Knee thugs and savages, they didn't call the snipers who shot Frank Clearwater at Wounded Knee in 73 a murderer, they didn't call the ones who shot Buddy Lamont a cold blooded murderer, they didn't call the ones who shot Joe Stuntz a cold blooded murderer, they didn't call the sniper who shot that young woman and baby in 1992 at Ruby Ridge Idaho in a cold blooded murder, they didn't call the ones who burned the men, women and children to death at Waco, Texas in 1993 in cold blooded murderers. I assume cold blooded means you have no sense of right or wrong or something of that nature when you take a life. And if that is so, then this country is full of cold blooded murderers and thugs because by proxy they have killed thousands of innocent men women and children in Iraq and most recently in Afghanistan, I've seen them on TV. I've seen the pictures of children's bodies piled on top of each other. And right now the US funds Israel's war machine as they kill hundreds of innocent men, women and children....

If I sound angry or hurt or disappointed or a multitude of other emotions you would probably be correct. I remember once upon a time, in my naïve belief that sooner or later I would be free and justice would be served. In my case after 33 years of illegal imprisonment justice will never be served, it will be up to the Creator to bring about a reaction that may in some future time balance the scales. But for me and the others like me, whether they are among other prisoners in the US prison system or dead in the streets of Iraq, Afghanistan, Gaza Strip or South America or some reservation road or some ghetto street, justice is not being served at this time.

If there is anything further I could say that would affect you in some way it would be to encourage you to take a few minutes out of your life and quietly sit and reflect and maybe just maybe you can hear the mothers crying for their lost children and the men crying for their lost wives and daughters and the grandfathers crying for their lost sons and I could say more but perhaps you may have grown tired of my commentary. Thank you for your time, thank you for reading this, and don't let evil triumph. Say something.

Deadly Democracy: Lancet Study Confirms Millions Died From Capitalist "Shock Therapy"

The world has become so inured to mass death, perhaps the following will merit little comment or outrage among our political punditry, even if the story did make the back pages of the New York Times.

A new Lancet study, "Mass privatisation and the post-communist mortality crisis," confirms what has been known but little discussed in the past eight to ten years: millions of people, mostly men of employment age, died as a result of the effects of the "shock therapy" transition from a collectivized to a privatized economy in Russia and other formerly "communist" states in East Europe. According to the Times article, by 2007 "the life expectancy of Russian men was less than 60 years, compared with 67 years in 1985."

Back in 2001, a UNICEF-IRC study had already claimed 3.2 million unnecessary deaths due to capitalist restoration. The Lancet study cites other figures, with up to "10 million missing men because of system change." As a result, adult mortality rates soared, up almost 13% in Russia, with much of the increase attributable to the mass unemployment that followed the collapse in state enterprises. The study noted, "the Russian population lost nearly 5 years of life expectancy between 1991 and 1994."

Other factors affecting the disastrous increase in the death rate included poor health care, rising HIV rates, higher alcoholism and drug addiction rates, as well as the effects of acute psychosocial stress, massive corruption, impoverishment, rising social inequalities, and social disorganization.

The effects of neo-liberal "shock therapy" on Russia and other East European countries (Russia being the hardest hit) were also felt by the children of the region. According to the UNICEF-IRC study noted above, tuberculosis rates rose by 50%; 150,000 children were added to the public care rolls (while overall population was dropping by millions); there were high levels of child malnutrition, and the number of children under age 5 fell by one-third.

This was not just a jolt of "shock therapy," it was a social tsunami that devastated the region. According to the Lancet, the more rapid the rate of privatization, the higher the death rate.

Radical free-market advisers argued that capitalist transition needed to occur as rapidly as possible. The prescribed policy was called shock therapy, with three major elements: liberalisation of prices and trade to allow markets to re-allocate resources, stabilisation programmes to suppress inflation, and mass privatisation of state-owned enterprises to create appropriate incentives. When implemented simultaneously, these elements would cause an irreversible shift to a market-based economy....

Although a direct cause and effect relation cannot be ascertained and a detailed discussion of their roles is beyond the scope of this Article, all these findings can be linked, in some way, to mass privatisation programmes.

As the U.S. economy teeters on the edge of free-fall, due to the unbridled policies of financial deregulation, and an evisceration of the tax base through so-called "trickle-down" economics with its massive tax cuts to the very rich, we should all ponder, with awe and great sadness, the final denouement of the Cold War, with its frenzy of capitalist restorationist policies in the old Soviet Union, and the tremendous human cost it involved.

It is also important in understanding where Russia is politically today, i.e., what were the social circumstances that produced the Putin regime. Ever since the contrived Georgia-South Ossetia conflict last summer, it has appeared that the military-industrial complex of the U.S. is looking to find new "enemies," should the public taste for the "Global War on Terror" lessen with an Obama administration, and fatigue over the fruitless and largely fictional "hunt" for Osama bin Laden and the crimes and disasters of the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.

Perhaps most of all, the sheer horror of the loss of life, the human tragedy of the return of "democracy" (in its free enterprise garb) to the former Soviet Union, is what we need to ponder. The truth behind the privatization policies of economists like Harvard-educated Jeffrey Sachs -- now head of the Earth Institute at Columbia University -- has been hidden for years now behind glibly optimistic statements of economic progress in now-capitalist Russia. Take for examine this summary of a 1997 article in the Journal of Comparative Economics on "Bank privitization in post-communist Russia", typical of the way the changes in Russia have been reported by the dominant social and educational Western elite:

The privatization of Zhilsotsbank of Russia demonstrates that the process of privatization can contribute to the eradication of the government's role in the corporate governance of banks. Incumbent bank managers obtained control rights over new private banks following Zhilsotsbank's decentralized privatization. The swift eradication of government from direct ownership of numerous banks, combined with broad licensing rules, has enabled the Russian banking industry to be over 75% private. Mosbusinessbank, a big commercial bank formed from 26 Zhilsotsbank branches, is one of the most profitable banks the old state banking system has produced.

There is not a word on the social cost of this increased profitability. In fact, the social disaster in Russia due to privatization and the restoration of capitalism in Russia is barely known or understood in the U.S., outside a sense that gangsterism was increased thereby.

The truth about world history since the end of World War II has largely been kept from the U.S. population, e.g. the recruitment of Nazi war criminals into U.S. government research programs, including the intelligence agencies, the mass murders in the 100,000s by U.S. allies in Korea (with U.S. connivance), the budget of U.S. intelligence agencies and the extent of the latter's covert actions around the globe, and the CIA's mind control project with its enlistment of top levels of social, medical and psychological personnel throughout the 1950s-1970s, and the secret medical experiments upon these programs involved.

The level of trust in what the U.S. government says is very low right now, thanks to the crimes of the Bush administration. The incoming Obama administration is sending mixed messages about what it intends as regards the past record of the United States. On one hand, the Obama people promise an open government and transparency; on the other hand, Obama himself says he intends to look forward and not backwards when it comes to former administration crimes, applying this standard even to such crimes as torture.

As we consider the pressing need to hold the U.S. to account, no matter what administration is in power, we might reflect upon the famous words of Nobel Prize-winning author William Faulkner: "The past is never dead. It's not even past." Shakespeare made essentially the same point hundreds of years earlier: "What’s past is prologue."

Holder Hearing Open Thread

Emptywheel over at Firedoglake is conducting an open thread running commentary for the Senate hearings on Eric Holder, which are going going on today. Interested readers may want to join in the fun, or find out what's going on, since C-SPAN is said not to be covering all of it.

Here's a snippet from Emptywheel's coverage, re what Holder said when questioned by Leahy on torture:

Leahy starts with waterboarding. "Two most recent nominees to serve as AG hedged on waterboarding. Do you agree with me that waterboarding is illegal?"

Holder: If you look at the history, I agree with you that waterboarding is torture.

Holder: no one above law. President has obligation to faithfully execute laws of US. Obligations from treaties and Constitution. The President acts most forcefully when he acts in manner consistent with Congressional intents and directions. It's my belief that President does not have power to authorize torture.

Top Bush Official Admits "We Tortured Qahtani"

"We tortured [Mohammed al-]Qahtani".... His treatment met the legal definition of torture. And that's why I did not refer the case [for prosecution]."

In a bombshell admission on the eve of the Senate hearings on Obama Attorney General nominee, Eric Holder, the Washington Post reports (in an article by Bob Woodward) that Susan Crawford, the convening authority of military commissions at Guantanamo since February 2007, investigated and determined that U.S. forces there tortured al-Qahtani during his imprisonment. The techniques included isolation, sleep deprivation, forced nudity, use of "working dogs", and prolonged exposure to cold, among other torture techniques.

Crawford, 61, said the combination of the interrogation techniques, their duration and the impact on Qahtani's health led to her conclusion. "The techniques they used were all authorized, but the manner in which they applied them was overly aggressive and too persistent. . . . You think of torture, you think of some horrendous physical act done to an individual. This was not any one particular act; this was just a combination of things that had a medical impact on him, that hurt his health. It was abusive and uncalled for. And coercive. Clearly coercive. It was that medical impact that pushed me over the edge" to call it torture, she said....

"I think the buck stops in the Oval Office."

Crawford also says not everyone at Guantanamo was tortured, but admits that its difficult for anyone to believe the government at this point. She lays the blame for the abuse at the feet of Rumsfeld and Bush.

Al-Qahtani became practically a household name when it was revealed that he was Detainee #063. Logs of the torture sessions were published in Time Magazine. Steven Miles wrote up al-Qahtani's case in the American Journal of Bioethics. Miles has meticulously documented the participation of doctors and other medical personnel, particularly psychologists, in the U.S. torture program. Al-Qahtani's case was a horrific exemplar of that dangerous collaboration:

In October 2002, before the time covered by the log, Army investigators found that dogs were brought to the interrogation room to growl, bark and bare their teeth at al-Qahtani. The investigators noted that a BSCT psychologist witnessed the use of the dog, Zeus, during at least one such instance, an incident deemed properly authorized to “exploit individual phobias"....

Major L. [John Leso], a psychologist who chaired the BSCT at Guantanamo, was noted to be present at the start of the interrogation log. On November 27, he suggested putting the prisoner in a swivel chair to prevent him from fixing his eyes on one spot and thereby avoiding the guards....

Many psychological “approaches” or “themes” were repetitively used. These included: “Failure/Worthless,” “Al Qaeda Falling Apart,” “Pride Down,” “Ego Down,” “Futility,” “Guilt/Sin Theme... Al-Qahtani was shown videotapes entitled “Taliban Bodies” and “Die Terrorist Die.” Some scripts aimed at his Islamic identity bore names such as “Good Muslim,” “Bad Muslim,” “Judgment Day,” “God’s Mission” and “Muslim in America"....

Although continuously monitored, interrogators repeatedly strip-searched him as a “control measure.” On at least one occasion, he was forced to stand naked with women soldiers present. Female interrogators seductively touched the prisoner under the authorized use of approaches called “Invasion of Personal Space” and “Futility"....

Some psychological routines referred to the 9/11 attacks. He was shown pictures of the attacks, and photographs of victims were affixed to his body. The interrogators held one exorcism (and threatened another) to purge evil Jinns that the disoriented, sleep deprived prisoner claimed were controlling his emotions.

As the inside word is that Obama will order Guantanamo closed, and all abusive interrogation techniques be ended, with interrogations limited only to those techniques specified in the Army Field Manual, officials associated with the Bush torture regime, both innocent and guilty (we cannot know right away who is who) are scampering for legal and moral cover.

Of course, limiting interrogation techniques to the Army's interrogation field manual leaves an open door for more abusive interrogation, as it allows the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, fear, sensory deprivation, and other techniques on those designated "unlawful enemy combatants." The U.S. may close Guantanamo, but what about the thousands of other prisoners held by the U.S. in Iraq, Afghanistan, prison ships, and CIA secret prisons? What will happen to them, if the AFM still allows some abusive techniques?

Much that Bush and Cheney have done has ended in failure. Guantanamo will close. The military commissions are a dead issue (for now). But not all they have done has been disassembled, and there will be much pressure on Obama to let some of the apparatus off the hook.

Right now, the biggest push among progressives, and with much popular support among the citizenry, is for investigations and prosecutions of the war criminals who are now leaving the White House. These should be supported with all our efforts. Bush and Cheney have both recently admitted to ordering torture.

Buhdydharma at Docudharma wrote the following today:

House Judiciary Committee Chairman John Conyers has just released a 487 page report (NOTE: pdf file) whose table of contents clearly spells out what must be on AG Holders agenda in both reforming the DOJ and to effectively "reclaim America's standing in the world as a nation that cherishes and protects individual freedom and basic human rights.":

Hiring and Firing of U.S. Attorneys and other Department Personnel
Selective Prosecution
Politicization of the Prosecution Function
Politicization of the Civil Rights Division and Voting Rights Enforcement
Detention
Enhanced Interrogation
Ghosting and Black Sites
Extraordinary Rendition
Warrantless Domestic Surveillance
National Security Letters (NSLs) and Exigent Letters
Use of Signing Statements
Midnight Rulemaking
The Leak of Valerie Plame Wilson's Covert CIA Identity
Improper Use of State Secrets and Other Authorities
Manipulation and Misuse of Intelligence

There is far more than probable cause to prosecute major figures of the Bush Administration, the Pentagon, and the CIA (and possibly DIA) for crimes against humanity, such as starting an aggressive war, and implementation of torture and abusive, inhumane treatment of prisoners. There is ample legal precedent to charge these individuals. If we do not do it, it should be undertaken by another willing nation.

A huge political battle will be waged over these issues in the next weeks and months. All progressives and anti-torture advocates should be ready to counter moves from the entrenched opposition centered in sections of the Pentagon and the CIA.

In the meantime, Susan Crawford has just thrown a dangerous projectile into the ranks of these criminals, and it's all the more satisfying as it comes from their own ranks. We should not expect too many more such "betrayals." The greatest danger will be thinking the closure of Guantanamo will really end things. It will only be one battle won. There will be more losses and victories before we see the end.

Update: The following was spurred by a comment by Nightprowlkitty in the comments to the Daily Kos crossposting to this article:

Torture is never legal. It is a jus cogens, a norm from which no derogation is permitted. Really these people are outside the pale, outside the law. Only the law can handle it though. But the sentences, if convicted, can be tough. Scott Horton reminded us the other day that the execution of Charles I of England, over 400 years ago, was for torture:

The charge, repeated the prosecutor, was that the executive had violated the laws of nations in that he authorized or indulged the torture and brutal mistreatment of prisoners taken in wartime. The commissioners deliberated and rendered their verdict: The charge against the defendant was sustained, the defendant was guilty as charged. And then the punishment was fixed. How does one punish an executive for violation of the laws of nations by authorizing the torture of prisoners? The verdict was that he be taken to a place of execution, where his head was to be severed from his body by an axe.

In today's column, Horton said this about Crawford's admission:

This admission is important for several reasons. First, it is an acknowledgement of criminal conduct by the administration by one of its own team. Second, Crawford very properly abandons the absurd legalisms of the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel which essentially boil down to “if the president authorizes it, that means it’s legal.” Third, she has apparently evaluated “torture” on the basis of the totality of the treatment meted out by interrogators and jailers to the prisoner, not by segmenting and evaluating each individual technique applied. That is what the law requires, and what the Justice Department studiously ignores, fully aware of the inevitable conclusion to which it would lead. It adds up to another admission of high crimes. The case for criminal accountability continues to build.

Invictus Honored as One of Top 50 Human Rights Blogs

I was flattered when the relatively new website, e-Justice, included this blog in a list of "the top 50 Human Rights blogs" posted earlier today. Included in their list are blogs dedicated to Civil Liberties (ACLU Blog of Rights, the Committee to Protect Journalists Blog, Progressive Liberty Blog, etc.), and eight other categories, including Capital Punishment, Child-Focused Blogs, International Outreach, General Ideology, Religion, Whistleblowers, Politics, and Miscellaneous.

I'm honored to have my blog included in e-Justice's compilation. For a full list of all the human rights blogs, go to their website.

But the lists don't stop there. e-Justice has compiled other lists of important sites and links, including 50 Ways to Protect Your Anonymity Online and Off, 100 Free DIY Legal Resources on the Web, and Top 50 Homeland Security Blogs.

Each listing in their compilations contains a capsule description of what the blogs offer. Happy hunting, surfers! And best of luck to the folks at e-Justice in their new enterprise.

Song of Enion

What is the price of Experience? Do men buy it for a song,
Or Wisdom for a dance in the street? No! it is bought with the price
Of all that a man hath -- his house, his wife, his children.
Wisdom is sold in the desolate market where none come to buy,
And in the wither'd field where the farmer ploughs for bread in vain.

It is an easy thing to triumph in the summer's sun,
And in the vintage, and to sing on the waggon loaded with corn:
It is an easy thing to talk of patience to the afflicted,
To speak the laws of prudence to the houseless wanderer,
To listen to the hungry raven's cry in wintry season,
When the red blood is fill'd with wine and with the marrow of lambs:

It is an easy thing to laugh at wrathful elements;
To hear the dog howl at the wintry door, the ox in the slaughter-house moan;
To see a God on every wind and a blessing on every blast;
To hear sounds of Love in the thunderstorm that destroys our enemy's house;
To rejoice in the blight that covers his field, and the sickness that cuts off his children,
While our olive and vine sing and laugh round our door, and our children bring fruits and flowers.

Then the groan and the dolour are quite forgotten, and the slave grinding at the mill,

And the captive in chains, and the poor in the prison, and the soldier in the field
When the shatter'd bone hath laid him groaning among the happier dead:
It is an easy thing to rejoice in the tents of prosperity --
Thus would I sing and thus rejoice; but it is not so with me.

From William Blake's The Four Zoas, 1796-1807?

More Calls for Prosecutions Over Administration Torture & War Crimes

David Swanson has an article up at Daily Kos. It summarizes the a report released by the "Steering Committee of the Justice Robert H. Jackson Conference On Planning For The Prosecution of High Level American War Criminals." The report names 30 Bush Administration officials involved in authorizing or engaging in torture, seeking to cover it up, Furthermore, according to Lawrence Velvel, chairman of the Steering Committee:

"Far from American officials and lawyers authorizing or engaging in torture because it was lawful, they authorized and engaged in it because they wanted to (and) kept their actions secret from interested officials for as long as they could lest there be strong opposition to the torture and abuse they were perpetrating," Velvel said. "They deliberately ignored repeated warnings that the torture and abuse were illegal and could lead to prosecutions, and they ignored these warnings even when they came from high level civilian and military officers"....

Bush officials were involved in shaping or carrying out torture policies despite written and/or verbal warnings given by high government officials in the Pentagon, State Department, FBI, and other agencies. Among these objectors were:

# William Howard Taft IV, the Legal Advisor to the State Department whose 40-page memo of January 11, 2002 warned Bush’s claim the Geneva Conventions were not applicable to prisoners held by the U.S. could subject Bush to prosecution for war crimes. State Department lawyer David Bowker further warned "there is no such thing" as a person that is not covered by the Geneva Conventions. # The Defense Department’s own Criminal Investigative Task Force headed by Col. Brittain Mallow warned Haynes that tactics used at Guantanamo could be illegal. His warning were ignored by Haynes, whose position was based on statements of Yoo and Chertoff. # FBI Director Robert Mueller barred FBI agents from participating in coercive CIA interrogations, "a warning-fact well known to many in the Executive," the Steering Committee Report said. Also, Marion Bowman, head of the FBI’s national security law section in Washington called lawyers in Jim Haynes’ office in the Pentagon to express his concern but said he never heard back. # David Brant, head of the Naval Criminal Investigative Service learned about the torture and abuse at Guantanamo and took the position that "it just ain’t right" and expressed his concern to Army officials in command authority over military interrogators at Guantanamo but "they did not care," the Report said. # A senior CIA intelligence analyst that visited Guantanamo in 2002 reported back that the U.S. was committing war crimes there and that one-third of the detainees had no connection to terrorism. The report alarmed Rice’s lawyer John Bellinger and National Security Council terrorism expert General John Gordon but their concerns were "flatly rejected and ignored" by Addington, Flanigan and Gonzales, as well as by Rumsfeld’s office. # Navy General Counsel Alberto Mora carried his concern over Guantanamo torture to Haynes and to Mary Walker, head of a Pentagon working group that was drafting a DOD memo based on Yoo’s work that authorized torture. Mora said what was occurring at Guantanamo was "at a minimum cruel and unusual treatment, and, at worst, torture." His warning was ignored.

Administration officials named include:

Vice President Dick Cheney and his former chief of staff and legal counsel David Addington, former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and her predecessor Colin Powell, former Attorneys-General John Ashcroft and Alberto Gonzales, Department of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff and his aide Alice Fisher, former deputy assistant Attorney General; and Tim Flanigan, a deputy White House attorney.

Also named are "Scooter" Libby, Douglas Feith, Stephen Cambone, former CIA Director George Tenet, Cofer Black, former Assistant Attorneys General Jay Bybee and John Yoo, Defense Department chief legal officer Jim Haynes, and General Michael Dunlavey, and Major General Geoffrey Miller, the former commander of Guantanamo prison, among others.

Besides Swanson and Vevel, members of the Steering Committee include President of the National Lawyers Guild, Marjorie Cohn, writer Elaine Scarry, Peter Weiss, the vice president of the Center For Constitutional Rights, and University of Toledo law professor Ben Davis, among others.

Meanwhile, up on Capitol Hill, Congressman Jerrold Nadler (Dem.-NY-08), Chair of the Judiciary Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights, and Civil Liberties, has reintroduced a resolution in the House of Representative that calls for that body to demand that President Bush render no pre-emptive pardons of Administration officials prior to leaving office.

Even more, the resolution would put the House on record as calling for formal investigation and possible prosecution of Bush administration law-breakers:

(4) it is the sense of the House of Representatives that a special investigative commission, or a Select Committee be tasked with investigating possible illegal activities by senior officials of the administration of President George W. Bush, including, if necessary, any abuse of the President’s pardon power; and

(5) the next Attorney General of the United States appoint an independent counsel to investigate, and, where appropriate, prosecute illegal acts by senior officials of the administration of President George W. Bush.

In addition to Nadler's resolution, mcjoan at Daily Kos reports:

Judiciary Chair John Conyers, on the first day of the 111th Congress, introduced H.R. 104, a bill that, as reported by TPM, would "set up a National Commission on Presidential War Powers and Civil Liberties, with subpoena power and a reported budget of around $3 million, to investigate issues ranging from detainee treatment to waterboarding to extraordinary rendition."

The next months will see a wild fight politically over the question of investigating Bush administration war crimes. In an interview on today's ABC "This Week" with George Stephanopoulos, President-elect Barack Obama seemed to throw cold water on the idea he would support investigations or prosecutions of Bush officials on torture, leaving open only the tiniest crevice of hope that he would.

STEPHANOPOULOS: The most popular question on your own website is related to this. On change.gov it comes from Bob Fertik of New York City and he asks, "Will you appoint a special prosecutor ideally Patrick Fitzgerald to independently investigate the greatest crimes of the Bush administration, including torture and warrantless wiretapping."

OBAMA: We're still evaluating how we're going to approach the whole issue of interrogations, detentions, and so forth. And obviously we're going to be looking at past practices and I don't believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards. And part of my job is to make sure that for example at the CIA, you've got extraordinarily talented people who are working very hard to keep Americans safe. I don't want them to suddenly feel like they've got to spend all their time looking over their shoulders and lawyering (ph).

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, no 9/11 commission with Independence subpoena power?

OBAMA: We have not made final decisions, but my instinct is for us to focus on how do we make sure that moving forward we are doing the right thing. That doesn't mean that if somebody has blatantly broken the law, that they are above the law. But my orientation's going to be to move forward.

STEPHANOPOULOS: So, let me just press that one more time. You're not ruling out prosecution, but will you tell your Justice Department to investigate these cases and follow the evidence wherever it leads?

OBAMA: What I -- I think my general view when it comes to my attorney general is he is the people's lawyer. Eric Holder's been nominated. His job is to uphold the Constitution and look after the interests of the American people, not to be swayed by my day-to-day politics. So, ultimately, he's going to be making some calls, but my general belief is that when it comes to national security, what we have to focus on is getting things right in the future, as opposed looking at what we got wrong in the past.

Stephanopoulos discussed the now popular theme of replacing CIA torture techniques with the procedures outlined in the Army Field Manual. Elsewhere, I have argued that the AFM is not a decent replacement, and contains within it a sophisticated program of psychological torture that only eschews the worst of the known interrogation techniques (waterboarding, sexual humiliation, stress positions, etc.). Here's the relevant exchange:

OBAMA: ...Vice President Cheney I think continues to defend what he calls extraordinary measures or procedures when it comes to interrogations and from my view waterboarding is torture. I have said that under my administration we will not torture.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How about them taking that to the next step. Right now the CIA has a special program, would you require that that program -- basically every government interrogation program be under the same standard, be in accordance with the army field manual?

OBAMA: My general view is that our United States military is under fire and has huge stakes in getting good intelligence. And if our top army commanders feel comfortable with interrogation techniques that are squarely within the boundaries of rule of law, our constitution and international standards, then those are things that we should be able to (INAUDIBLE)

The country is rightly preoccupied with the terrible economic crisis and massive growing unemployment. Much of the political class is preoccupied with the criminal assault of U.S. forces on the population of Gaza, in the name of subduing Hamas. It seems entirely possible that sufficient public will to investigate and prosecute Bush and company will not materialize. That would be a horrible mistake. As Lawrence Vevel put it:

"If Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney, and others are not prosecuted," Velvel said, "the future could be threatened by additional examples of Executive lawlessness by leaders who need fear no personal consequences for their actions, including more illegal wars such as Iraq."

British Jews Decry Israel's Holocaust-like Attack

From Stephen Soldz's blog, which has switched into high-gear coverage of the criminal and ongoing attack by Israeli military forces on the Palestinians in the Gaza Strip:

The Guardian has published an important letter from over 70 British Jews objecting to the war on Gaza and making the natural connection with the Warsaw Ghetto. They call for “a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions”:

We the undersigned are all of Jewish origin. When we see the dead and bloodied bodies of young children, the cutting off of water, electricity and food, we are reminded of the siege of the Warsaw Ghetto. When Dov Weisglass, an adviser to the Israeli prime minister, Ehud Olmert, talked of putting Gazans “on a diet” and the deputy defence minister, Matan Vilnai, talked about the Palestinians experiencing “a bigger shoah” (holocaust), this reminds us of Governor General Hans Frank in Nazi-occupied Poland, who spoke of “death by hunger”.

The real reason for the attack on Gaza is that Israel is only willing to deal with Palestinian quislings. The main crime of Hamas is not terrorism but its refusal to accept becoming a pawn in the hands of the Israeli occupation regime in Palestine.

The decision last month by the EU council to upgrade relations with Israel, without any specific conditions on human rights, has encouraged further Israeli aggression. The time for appeasing Israel is long past. As a first step, Britain must withdraw the British ambassador to Israel and, as with apartheid South Africa, embark on a programme of boycott, divestment and sanctions.

Ben Birnberg, Prof Haim Bresheeth, Deborah Fink, Bella Freud, Tony Greenstein, Abe Hayeem, Prof Adah Kay, Yehudit Keshet, Dr Les Levidow, Prof Yosefa Loshitzky, Prof Moshe Machover, Miriam Margolyes, Prof Jonathan Rosenhead and 65 others

Meanwhile, the latest news from Gaza continues to be terribly grim. From today's New York Times:

JERUSALEM — Israeli troops pushed into a heavily populated area of Gaza City from the south on Sunday in fierce fighting as senior Israeli officials said that they believe the Hamas military wing is beginning to crack, and that Hamas leaders inside Gaza are looking for a cease-fire....

According to Palestinian Ministry of Health figures on Sunday, nearly 900 Palestinians have died so far in the conflict, including 275 children and 93 women. The figure does not include complete figures for Hamas fighters, who have not been brought to hospitals....

Three rockets were fired from Gaza at Israel on Sunday morning, Israeli Army radio said. Two exploded near Beersheva, injuring several people. The third hit empty land....

In a press conference on Sunday, a senior United Nations official, Maxwell Gaylard, the deputy special coordinator for UNSCO, the Office of the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process, said that the humanitarian situation for Gaza’s 1.5 million people is deteriorating.

“People are terrified, hungry, thirsty and traumatized,” he said. “The civilian population is caught in the middle of this conflict,” he said, and added: “This is a conflict where the civilian population has nowhere to flee.”

The near-total impotence of the forces of peace, who rely on appeals to the same criminals that either conduct the atrocities, or to those political forces that back them, especially the U.S. government, could not be clearer. Yet someone needs to do something, and the large rallies internationally opposing the Israel attack and atrocities represent a genuine effort to express outrage and some kind of attempt to do something to mobilize public opinion.

Now Reuters reports from Cairo that Egyptian police have arrested 21 members of the Muslim Brotherhood after a rally was held in protest against Israel's offensive.

The Egyptian government and security agencies have been eager to suppress protests against the Israeli attacks on Gaza, in which protesters frequently condemn the government for what they see as its complicity in the blockade of the coastal strip.

In recent days protesters have called for the expulsion of the Israeli ambassador to Cairo, and for Egypt to open its Rafah border crossing with Gaza to allow Palestinians to flee the 16-day onslaught which has killed 869 people.

Up to 40 protesters may have been arrested at rallies in London, and similar arrests have taken place in protests from Paris to Denmark. Numerous protests across the United States, from Times Square and Chestnut Hill/Boston to Los Angeles/Westwood and San Francisco, have been mostly peaceful, but controversy and tension between pro-Israeli groups or individuals and those who defend the Palestinians have broken out at times. The intensity of the conflict in Gaza, and the agony over the attack upon innocent civilians with loss of life in the hundreds, has ratcheted up feelings among concerned citizens around the world.

Protesters and political activists should add to their list of demands the release of all protesters and activists arrested for protesting Israel's criminal assault.

Bailout Politics: Is the Constitution Now Null and Void?

Article I, Section 9, Clause 7, U.S. Constitution

No money shall be drawn from the treasury, but in consequence of appropriations made by law; and a regular statement and account of receipts and expenditures of all public money shall be published from time to time.

A Congressional watchdog program tasked with accounting for the hundreds of billions of dollars allocated to the Troubled Asset Relief Program, or TARP, reports that it can't get enough information on how the money is being spent.

According to ABC News:

Of the 44 questions the panel presented earlier to the Treasury Department, the department responded to 19. The report suggests that some of the answers the Treasury provided were inadequate.

"While Treasury's letter provided responses to some of the panel's questions and shed some light on Treasury's decision-making process, it did not provide complete answers to several of the questions and failed to address some of the questions at all," the report said.

Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, who heads the congressional panel, says she's "shocked," but that it's up to Congress to do something about it.

Will anyone do something about it? After all, an accounting for government money is a requirement laid down in the Constitution. Does the Constitution mean anything anymore? Can any and all laws be broken now? Or only if you belong to the executive branch of government.

The non-accountability of government funding was established first in 1947, when the National Security Act created the CIA, and placed its budget outside the purview of Congressional oversight. In 1976, a Congressional committee investigating how the CIA spent its money concluded (as reported in the New York Times, emphasis is added):

Washington, Jan. 25 -- The House Select Committee on Intelligence has concluded following a year-long investigation that the Federal intelligence agencies, as they are currently constituted, operate in such secret ways that they are "beyond the scrutiny" of Congress, according to the panel's final report....

The expenditures of [intelligence] funds, the report said, were largely unchecked by Congress and even by the Office of Management and Budget.

This House report was written by what is known today as the Pike Committee. It was contemporaneous with the famous Church Report from the Senate. The CIA protested making the Pike report public, and as a result, it was never officially published, or made available by the government. (Maybe someone could get Obama or Pelosi to finally release it!)

Daniel Schorr (with NPR today) leaked the report and it was published in the Village Voice. However, it is unavailable online, and one would have to go to a library to find it.

We are paying today for the bargain with the devil that blithely canceled out a portion of the Constitution in the name of secrecy. Then it was the Cold War, now it is a financial crisis.

In Justice Joesph Story's famous commentaries on the U.S. Constitution, he wrote:

...in arbitrary governments the prince levies what money he pleases from his subjects, disposes of it as he thinks proper and is beyond responsibility or reproof.... [In a republic] Congress is made the guardian of [the public treasure]; and to make their responsibility complete and perfect, a regular account of the receipts and expenditures is required to be published, that the people may know what money is expended for what purpose and by what authority. (from R. Borosage, "The Central Intelligence Agency: The King's Men and the Constitutional Order", in The CIA File, 1976, p. 134)

The cancer of secret government is spreading from the intelligence and clandestine branches to the very heart of the working government -- the Treasury Department. Congressional will and oversight are flouted and there are no consequences.

The flow of societal authority and legitimacy flows downhill. When there is lawlessness at the top, and the rule of arbitrary authority, the social contract is broken, and the menace of anarchy, fascism, and civil war rises ominously.

The press is too house-broken to take on the reality of the lawlessness by the government. They proved this already when it came to the Iraq War build-up, or on the craven attitude towards the use of torture, even today, when the truth about the abusive torture techniques in the supposedly reformist Army Field Manual is denied or hidden from view. Even the mainstream bloggers -- Glenn Greenwald, Scott Horton, Andrew Sullivan, who have reported so much on the torture issue -- have had nothing to say about the AFM issue. Nor has anyone in the U.S. press even noted that there is a Constitutional requirement that the Treasury Department report to Congress a full accounting of expenditures.

Is Congress ignorant, unable, or totally corrupted by the executive power? Probably some combination of all three. Meanwhile the average American lives in dread of a total economic collapse, or least the loss of a job and lowered wages, with very little to look forward to for the fruits of a life's labors.

Sooner or later, trust in the government will fall like the house of cards that was the bubble economy. Then, the legitimacy of all branches of government will be nil, and their power, so vaunted now, so sure of itself with its courts, and jails, and mighty army and secret police, will be like tinkling brass. But how many will suffer until then? How many generations will live and struggle and die under the rule of a lawless elite?

I'm not sure any rule of law is possible anymore. But we could start with enforcing the U.S. Constitution, including Article I, Section 9, Clause 7. That beginning would find both the U.S. Treasury and the CIA finally giving account for the taxpayers money that flows in billions and billions into their coffers.

"They Made Us Do It"

The following article was published at Counterpunch on January 5, 2009. Dr. Bond has kindly given me permission to post it here. Dr. Bond has been trying for some time to hold the psychologists who staffed the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams responsible for their actions, resulting in torture and abuse at Guantanamo's Camp Delta. She has tried to also make the American Psychological Association accountable for its policy of support for such psychologists, and for their failure to act in an ethical manner.

The Madness Among Us

By Dr. Trudy Bond

The current simplistic mantra of the Israeli government as they bomb and maim and kill and destroy in Gaza is "They made us do it." Similar posturing is found in decisions and actions by the U.S. government and military during the last eight years, too numerous to mention. Why did our government pay bounties for hundreds of Muslims, lock them up in a prison by the sea, and eliminate all their human rights? "They made us do it."

Yet after an 18-month investigation of detainee abuse by the Senate Armed Services Committee, the Committee's Executive Summary and Conclusions states that, rather than finding the actions of the government and military toward detainees justified, the investigation determined culpability. The Committee's Summary and Conclusions both places the responsibility for torture directly in the White House, as Dick Cheney has proudly affirmed, and connects the participation and responsibility of psychologists in that torture.

Bush's team has focused on justification and rationalization of torture, (or as Doug Feith said, "The problem with moral authority [was] people who should know better . . . siding with the assholes, to put it crudely."), while the American Psychological Association has practiced deception and misinformation in attempts to evade the reality of their involvement in torture.

According to the recently-released findings of the Senate Committee:

At about the same time, a dispute over the use of aggressive techniques was raging at GTMO over the interrogation of Mohammed al-Khatani, a high value detainee. Personnel from CITF and the Federal Bureau of Investigations (FBI) had registered strong opposition, to interrogation techniques proposed for use on Khatani and made those concerns known to the DoD General Counsel's office. Despite those objections, an interrogation plan that included aggressive techniques was approved. The interrogation itself, which actually began on November 23, 2002, a week before the Secretary's December 2, 2002 grant of blanket authority for the use of aggressive techniques, continued through December and into mid-January 2003.

It was psychologist and APA member John Leso who was instrumental in developing and implementing the above-referenced interrogation plan as detailed in documents released by the Senate hearings in June, 2008. Minutes of a Counter Resistance Strategy Meeting on 10/2/02 document Major John Leso and Major Burney as the Behavioral Science Consultation Team describing for others present at the meeting the reversed-engineered SERE Psychological Training, which included a specific discussion of al-Qahtani, "recalling how he has responded to certain types of deprivation and psychological stressors." Notably, the date of 10/2/02 indicates that APA member Leso and cohorts had already been abusing and torturing al-Qahtani (spelled Khatani in the Senate report) months before the Defense Secretary's grant of blanket authority.

The Committee's Conclusions continue:

That same day, GTMO suspended its use of aggressive techniques on Khatani. While key documents relating to the interrogation remain classified, published accounts indicate that military working dogs had been used against Khatani. He had also been deprived of adequate sleep for weeks on end, stripped naked, subjected to loud music, and made to wear a leash and perform dog tricks. In a June 3, 2004 press briefing, SOUTHCOM Commander General James Hill traced the source of techniques used on Khatani back to SERE, stating: “The staff at Guantanamo working with behavioral scientists [John Leso], having gone up to our SERE school and developed a list of techniques which our lawyers decided and looked at, said were OK.” General Hill said “we began to use a few of those techniques ... on this individual...” [Mohammed al-Qahtani]

On May 13, 2008, the Pentagon announced in a written statement that the Convening Authority for military commissions “dismissed without prejudice the sworn charges against Mohamed al Khatani.” The statement does not indicate the role his treatment may have played in that decision.

Charges were dismissed without prejudice as it became very clear that Leso and Burney, the psychologist and psychiatrist who formed the Behavioral Science Consultation Team charged with developing the Special Interrogation Plan for Mohammed al-Qahtani, had crossed the line into torture and no charges could be proven.

Thus Stephen Behnke, attorney, psychologist and director of ethics for the American Psychological Association since 2000, has spent much of the last six years falsifying APA's position. He has yet to explain in any of his many interviews and letters why Dr. Leso has been allowed to create, collude and condone the abuse of al-Qahtani and remain a member of APA without any sanctions or accountability.

In a letter to Harper's on November 22, 2007, he wrote, "The position of the American Psychological Association is unequivocal: For more than 20 years, the association has absolutely condemned any psychologist participation in torture . . ."

The utter lack of action by APA to ethical complaints against John Leso and other APA members is evidence that APA's position does not meet the definition of "unequivocal." Better adjectives might include equivocal, imprecise, inexact, unclear, cryptic, enigmatic and ambivalent, as Behnke continued in his letter to Harper's: " . . . Given the concerns that have been expressed let me state clearly and unequivocally [he likes that word] the 2007 Resolution should never be interpreted as allowing isolation, sensory deprivation and over-stimulation, or sleep deprivation either alone or in combination to be used as interrogation techniques to break down a detainee in order to elicit information.”

More recently, in a radio broadcast on WHYY "Radio Times" on October 30, 2008, Dr. Behnke stated: "Well, an ethical interrogation is one in which fully protects (sic) the human rights of the detainee, and that is what the American Psychological Association has been fighting with policies that allow torture or abuse. Our position has been called by the national media a rebuke of the Bush administration interrogation policy. So what we have been doing is fighting any policy that permits torture or abuse and that does not fully protect the human rights of the detainees."

27 November 2002

1000: Control puts detainee in swivel chair at MAJ L’s [Major Leso's] suggestion to keep him awake and stop him from fixing his eyes on one spot in booth . . . Control used 'onion' analogy to explain how detainee’s control over his life is being stripped away. Control gives detainee three facts: we are hunting down Al Qaida every day, we will not stop until they are captured or killed, we control every aspect of your life.

Postscript: After leaving Guantanamo, John Leso was sent to the U.S. Embassy in Austria for a time. As recently as 2007, John Leso was back in the U.S. and stationed at Fort Rucker, Alabama, which includes the Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape school (SERE) for Army Aviation. Mohammed al-Qahtani remains in a cell at Guantanamo, in limbo, having all charges against him dropped.

Dr. Trudy Bond is a psychologist in Toledo, Ohio. She can be reached at ar_mordilo@yahoo.com.

The Grapes of Wrath

The atrocities against civilians in Gaza never seem to end, as Israel continues its assault against the Palestinians and the Hamas party and militia. The death toll is now over 700; thirteen Israelis are said to have died during the attack, some from "friendly fire."

Half of Gaza has no electricity. The International Red Cross suspended aid deliveries temporarily after its one of its convoys came under Israeli fire. Four U.N. Relief and Works Agency local staff have been killed. Now the United Nations has indefinitely suspended all humanitarian aid to the Gaza Strip, blaming Israel's attacks against their facilities. The list goes on and on.

Nothing has been more horrifying than the massacre of Palestinian civilians. The news is grim. The Red Cross has rescued children, too weak to stand, lying next to their dead mothers. From the L.A. Times report:

The Israeli army had built earth walls, making it impossible to bring ambulances into the neighborhood, the report said. "Therefore, the children and the wounded had to be taken to the ambulances on a donkey cart," it said.

Israeli soldiers also ordered the rescue team to leave the area but the team refused to depart, the report said.

The Red Cross said it "believes that in this instance the Israeli military failed to meet its obligation under international humanitarian law to care for and evacuate the wounded. It considers the delay in allowing rescue services access unacceptable."

On Monday, one Gaza house was totally destroyed by Israeli shelling. Incredibly, up to 60 or 70 family members of the extended al Samouni clan, gathered for protection in the house, died in that attack. Two days ago the Israelis shelled a UN school in the Jabaliya Refugee Camp, killing 40 Palestinians, and injuring scores more. Today, the Israelis admitted they knew there was no firing coming from the school itself, and yet still they shelled it. The UN had been sheltering refugees from the fighting in these schools.

In Gaza, there is no place safe left, and the Israeli assault is relentless.

The anger building towards the Israeli attack is intense. Psychologically, as the event plays out on the world media and Internet stage, the sense of personal impotence by watching such slaughter from afar is excruciating. At one professional listserv that I know, members with differing opinions on the conflict are ripping themselves apart, lost in acrimonious exchanges about who is right and wrong, and what should be done. The conflict threatens the very existence of the listserv, which had been very active in organizing for social causes.

Of course, listservs are small potatoes compared to what the Palestinians themselves are suffering. And outside Gaza, one wonders how many newly embittered and angry souls are filling their hearts with dreams of vengeance. Gleen Greenwald had the same thought, and so did Juan Cole, who Greenwald quoted in a posting today (emphasis in original):

In 1996, Israeli jets bombed a UN building where civilians had taken refuge at Cana/Qana in south Lebanon, killing 102 persons; in the place where Jesus is said to have made water into wine, Israeli bombs wrought a different sort of transformation. In the distant, picturesque port of Hamburg, a young graduate student studying traditional architecture of Aleppo saw footage like this on the news [graphic]. He was consumed with anguish and the desire for revenge. As soon as operation Grapes of Wrath had begun the week before, he had written out a martyrdom will, indicating his willingness to die avenging the victims, killed in that operation--with airplanes and bombs that were a free gift from the United States. His name was Muhammad Atta. Five years later he piloted American Airlines 11 into the World Trade Center. . . .

On Tuesday, the Israeli military shelled a United Nations school to which terrified Gazans had fled for refuge, killing at least 42 persons and wounding 55, virtually all of them civilians, and many of them children. The Palestinian death toll rose to 660.

You wonder if someone somewhere is writing out a will today.

Meanwhile, the pathetic and craven United States Senate passed a non-binding resolution in support of Israel, while calling for a ceasefire. No one mentioned, of course, the amount of U.S. bombs and shells shipped to Israel for their criminal offensive.

Considering the dire situation, Psychologists for Social Responsibility have issued this "action alert":

Dear PsySR Members and Friends,

Psychologists for Social Responsibility urges you to join us in strongly advocating that the U.S. Congress, the U.S. government, and the leaders of other nations and international organizations immediately prioritize:

(1) Immediate international action for a ceasefire on all sides in Gaza and Israel.
(2) Intensive humanitarian relief efforts.
(3) Much more vigorous and sustained international leadership for negotiations involving all sides and including the issue of mutual recognition and security for Israel, Gaza, and all Palestinians.

The emergency humanitarian crisis in Gaza demands such immediate action.

PsySR urges you to contact today your lawmakers, national government officials, and all other relevant contacts that you can make to strongly advocate for such emergency U.S. and international action.

How the U.S. Army's Field Manual Codified Torture -- and Still Does

Originally posted at AlterNet, and reposted here with additional links and some minor format changes

In early September 2006, the U.S. Department of Defense, reeling from at least a dozen investigations into detainee abuse by interrogators, released Directive 2310.01E. This directive was advertised as an overhaul and improvement on earlier detainee operations and included a newly rewritten Army Field Manual for Human Intelligence Collector Operations (FM-2-22-3). This guidebook for interrogators was meant to set a humane standard for U.S. interrogators worldwide, a standard that was respectful of the Geneva Conventions and other U.S. and international laws concerning treatment of prisoners.

While George W. Bush was signing a presidential directive allowing the CIA to conduct other, secret "enhanced interrogation techniques," which may or may not have included waterboarding, the new AFM was sold to the public as a return to civilized norms, in regards to interrogation.

Before long, opponents of U.S. torture policy were championing the new AFM as an appropriate "single-standard" model of detainee treatment. Support for implementing the revised AFM, as a replacement for the hated "enhanced" techniques earlier championed by Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld and the CIA, began to appear in legislation out of Congress, in the literature of human-rights organizations and in newspaper editorials. Some rights groups have felt the new AFM offered some improvements by banning repellent interrogation tactics, such as waterboarding, use of nudity, military dogs and stress positions. It was believed the AFM cemented the concept of command responsibility for infractions of the law.

There was only one problem: the AFM did not eliminate torture. Despite what it said, it did not adhere to the Geneva Conventions. Even worse, it took the standard operating procedure of Camp Delta at Guantanamo Bay and threatened to expand it all over the world.

The President of the National Lawyers Guild Marjorie Cohn has stated that portions of the AFM protocol, especially the use of isolation and prolonged sleep deprivation, constitutes cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment and is illegal under the Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, the U.N. Convention Against Torture and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. Hina Shamsi, an attorney with the ACLU's National Security Project, has stated that portions of the AFM are "deeply problematic" and "would likely violate the War Crimes Act and Geneva," and at the very least "leave the door open for legal liability." Physicians for Human Rights and the Constitution Project have publicly called for the removal of problematic and abusive techniques from the AFM.

Yet, the interrogation manual is still praised by politicians, including then-presidential candidate Barack Obama, who in December 2007 said he would "have the Army Field Manual govern interrogation techniques for all United States Government personnel and contractors."

Viral Instructions for a Torture Paradigm

I call the covert actualization of torture in current Department of Defense interrogation policy the "viralization" of the Army Field Manual. Just as a computer virus inserts a seemingly harmless set of instructions or code into a computer's operating system, unnamed four-star combatant commanders insisted that a special "interrogation-control technique" be inserted into the new manual. In a computer, viral instructions morph into a destructive set of routines, which replicate and continue to pass the tainted instructions on to uninfected users.

The viral instructions in the AFM transform into an abusive and illegal torture program. Most of these "instructions" can be found hidden in the proverbial fine print of the document, in its very last appendix, labeled with no apparent irony as regards the mythology of James Bond, Appendix M.

Appendix M, titled "Restricted Interrogation Technique -- Separation," misrepresents itself from the very beginning. (One wonders if it was rewritten from an earlier draft, at a time when the Pentagon wanted to keep these procedures classified.) It is not actually a technique (singular), but a set of techniques, though one has to read deeply into its 10 pages of text and be somewhat sophisticated in the history of psychological torture procedures, to assemble a full view of the viral program.

This program is nothing less than the one established in researcher Albert Biderman's Chart of Coercion, which, as revealed by the recent Senate Armed Services Committee investigation into detainee abuse, was the blueprint used by SERE instructors at Guantanamo in late 2002 to teach abusive interrogation techniques. (SERE stands for Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape and is the military program to "inoculate" certain military personnel against torture or abusive treatment by an enemy that doesn't recognize Geneva protocol.)

The committee's investigations, along with an DOD Office of Inspector General report released last year, definitively proved that SERE instructors, some of whom were military psychologists who also worked as contract personnel for the CIA, reverse-engineered SERE's didactic and experiential program meant to protect U.S. POWs for use as torture on detainees at Guantanamo, Iraq and Afghanistan.

Army G-2 senior intelligence officer Lt. Gen. Jeff Kimmons described the "technique" of separation at a DOD briefing on Sept. 6, 2006, unveiling the "new" AFM:

... we include one restricted technique called separation, for use on a by-exception basis only with unlawful enemy combatants. That is, it's not authorized for use on prisoners of war and other protected persons.

Separation allows interrogators to keep unlawful enemy combatants apart from each other as a normal part of the interrogation process, so they can't coordinate their stories and so that we can compare answers to questions that interrogators have posed to each other without there having been collusion. It's for the same reason that police keep murder suspects separated while they're questioning them, although this is within an interrogation context.

Separation meets the standard for humane treatment, the single standard that exists across DOD, and it is enshrined in this manual.

This description is inconsistent with the explanation for separation given in the current Army Field Manual. Separation is not about the "normal interrogation process":

The use of separation should not be confused with the detainee-handling techniques approved in Appendix D. Specifically, the use of segregation during prisoner handling (Search, Silence, Segregate, Speed, Safeguard and Tag) should not be confused with the use of separation as a restricted interrogation technique….

Separation should be used as part of a well-orchestrated strategy involving the innovative application of unrestricted approach techniques. Separation requires special approval, judicious execution, special control measures and rigorous oversight.

Analyzing "Separation"

What kind of procedures, which the manual avers cannot be used on regular prisoners of war (who are covered by the Geneva Convention Relative to the Treatment of Prisoners of War), make up this special interrogation "technique," separation? In fact, it includes the following: solitary confinement, perceptual or sensory deprivation, sleep deprivation, the induction of fear and hopelessness, and the likely use of sensory overload, temperature or environmental manipulation, and any number of other techniques permitted elsewhere in the AFM, such as "Emotional Pride Down." As at Guantanamo and at prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan, a "multidisciplinary" team implements the program, including a behavioral science consultant (likely a psychologist).

The primary technique of the separation procedure is the physical isolation of the prisoner for up to 30 days, with further isolation possible upon approval of higher-ups. According to scientific expert Stuart Grassian, the use of isolation, or solitary confinement, causes "severe psychiatric harm." Some detainees will "suffer permanent harm as a result of such confinement." As long ago as 1961, psychiatrist Lawrence Hinkle Jr. wrote in a textbook on interrogations (emphasis added):

It is well known that prisoners, especially if they have not been isolated before, may develop a syndrome similar in most of its features to the "brain syndrome"... they cease to care about their utterances, dress and cleanliness. They become dulled, apathetic and depressed. In due time they become disoriented and confused; their memories become defective, and they experience hallucinations and delusions....

Classically, isolation has been used as a means of "making a man talk," simply because it is so often associated with a deterioration of thinking and behavior and is accompanied by an intense need for companionship and for talk. From the interrogator's viewpoint it has seemed to be the ideal way of "breaking down" a prisoner, because, to the unsophisticated, it seems to create precisely the state that the interrogator desires … However, the effect of isolation upon the brain function of the prisoner is much like that which occurs if he is beaten, starved or deprived of sleep.

Those prisoners who cannot be secured in sufficient isolation, presumably at a forward interrogation site, will be secured via "Field Expedient Separation," during which a both blindfold and earmuffs are put on a detainee for up to 12 hours. Again this is expandable upon official approval. The AFM warns that care must be taken to protect the blindfolded, earmuffed prisoner from self-injury, and the prisoner must be medically monitored. The AFM doesn't explain why this is necessary, but the reason is that such sensory deprivation is intolerable for some people and can lead to hallucinations and self-injurious behavior. The inclusion of a procedure that so obviously needs medical monitoring should be a red flag that it violates basic humane treatment.

The other main use of torture is Appendix M's provision for prolonged sleep deprivation, holding a prisoner to no more than four hours of sleep per night for 30 days. As with isolation and perceptual deprivation, this procedure can be prolonged with official approval. Sleep deprivation is used to break an individual down both physically and mentally. The literature on the corrosive effects of sleep deprivation is not difficult to find. Four hours of sleep per day for a month will decrease thyrotropin secretion and increase levels of cortisol, causing stress and high blood pressure. It impairs verbal processing and complex problem solving. Chronic sleep deprivation is "associated with irritability, depression and a reduced sense of well-being."

The AFM's Appendix M makes a lot of noise about forbidding sensory deprivation, then provides a definition of same that would describe none but the most extreme examples of sensory deprivation, all the while allowing its practice upon prisoners. Similarly, the document claims it is consistent with the Geneva Conventions and other human rights documents. It denies that prisoners held under separation will be treated to "excessive noise," "excessive dampness" or "excessive or inadequate heat, light or ventilation." But rather than appear convincing, these caveats seem to direct the interrogation team to just those kinds of procedures that should be used, as long as it is not judged "excessive." At the September 2006 briefing, Kimmons assured reporters that Appendix M had been legally vetted by "senior DOD figures at the secretarial level, by the Joint Staff, by each of the combatant commanders and their legal advisers, by each of the service secretaries and service chiefs and their legal advisers, in addition to the director of the Defense Intelligence Agency and the director of National Intelligence, who coordinated laterally with the CIA." It was also "favorably reviewed" by Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' Justice Department. This is not a legal vetting that inspires much confidence.

The total effect of combining all the procedures enumerated above, particularly in an atmosphere of fear and futility or hopelessness, is to produce a state not dissimilar to that described by Albert Biderman in his famous Chart of Coercion, as described elsewhere by this author and by Scott Shane of the New York Times. Social psychologist Biderman had studied the techniques of Soviet, Chinese and Korean interrogators and constructed a model of coercive interrogation that was later used by SERE interrogators at Guantanamo (as described above). Biderman's Chart of Coercion enumerates the key abusive techniques as isolation, monopolization of perception, induced debilitation and exhaustion, threats, occasional indulgences, demonstrating "omnipotence" and "omniscience" (i.e., complete control over a prisoner's fate), degradation and enforcement of trivial demands. What we have here, in sum, is what has come to be known in the 21st century as the Guantanamo model.

It is the intent of the Army Field Manual's Appendix M to institute the Guantanamo model across all military sites. The use of separation is supposed to be limited to "unlawful enemy combatants." Hina Shamsi, with the ACLU, notes that the Geneva Conventions allow for no status-based discrimination as the basis of differentiating interrogation techniques. The use of such different techniques "could lead to a conflicting and confusing situation," and the violation of domestic or international laws, according to Shamsi. Beyond that is the distinction of marking certain combatants as "unlawful," which is highly controversial and for which there seems to be no adequate precedent in the law of war.

One last example should suffice to demonstrate the perfidy upon which the Army Field Manual was rewritten. (The revamping of the AFM was supervised by Stephen Cambone, Rumsfeld's undersecretary of defense for intelligence, also notoriously in charge of the Pentagon's secretive sabotage and assassination teams, code-named Grey Fox.) In the last version of the AFM (FM 34-52), published in 1992, the use of fear-based techniques was divided into Fear Up Harsh and Fear Up Mild, with a strong warning issued that the use of Fear Up "has the greatest potential to violate the law of war." In the contemporary version of the AFM, the division of the technique into harsh and mild categories is abandoned, while the cautionary language is weakened. Meanwhile, the definition of Fear Up has changed as well.

From the 1992 manual:

The fear-up approach is the exploitation of a source's pre-existing fear during the period of capture and interrogation. (pp. 3-15)

In the 2006 manual, the definition adds a sinister new twist (emphasis added):

In the fear-up approach, the HUMINT [human intelligence] collector identifies a pre-existing fear or creates a fear within the source. He then links the elimination or reduction of the fear to cooperation on the part of the source. … The HUMINT collector should also be extremely careful that he does not create so much fear that the source becomes unresponsive. (pp. 8-10)

In a manner similar to the introduction of the harmful technique of sleep deprivation, the new policy of creating a new fear within a detainee is introduced with a simple grammatical clause. A few words inserted here and there, and the viral program is complete. (Interestingly, the old 1992 AFM says that "increased fear-up" is a "proven effective" technique, but elsewhere describes fear-up harsh as "usually a dead-end," interrogation-wise.)

The Fight Against the "New" Army Field Manual

With the start of a new administration and the swearing in of a new Congress, changes to President Bush's program of torture and abusive detention and interrogation are in the offing. The controversy over the possible nomination of CIA official John Brennan to the directorship of the Central Intelligence Agency, which led to a wide protest, including a letter critical of the choice addressed to President-elect Barack Obama and signed by 200 psychologists and mental health professionals, led to the withdrawal of Brennan from consideration.

As a new administration and Congress consider how to clean up the mess left them by the Bush administration, when it comes to the torture issue, many liberals in the political class are looking to a global adoption of the Army Field Manual as a kind of anodyne for this problem. An example of how far the virus has spread is the petition by the well-regarded Campaign to Ban Torture, signed by a plethora of "respected leaders," including Obama's nominee for White House National Security Adviser, retired Marine Gen. James L. Jones. Espousing a "golden rule" over interrogation practice, the CBT declaration states:

We will have one national standard for all U.S. personnel and agencies for the interrogation and treatment of prisoners. Currently, the best expression of that standard is the U.S. Army Field Manual, which will be used until any other interrogation technique has been approved based on the Golden Rule principle.

The Guantanamo virus is spreading. Its agent is Appendix M of the Army Field Manual. It will be very difficult to eradicate. It will require the effort of every person who believes in human rights and is opposed to torture to spread the word. A few crucial human rights and legal organizations have already spoken out against Appendix M, but we have yet to hear from groups such as Amnesty International, Human Rights First or the Center for the Victims of Torture. Congressmembers must be called. Letters to the editor must be written. Bloggers must give their unique independent commentary.

The AFM as constituted must not be made the "one national standard" until the virus is eradicated. Appendix M must be rescinded in its totality, and portions of the document, such as the section on Fear Up, rewritten. Otherwise, Bush's and Rumsfeld's attempt to sneak coercive methods of interrogation into the main document of human intelligence gathering used by the military will succeed.

This effort must be combined, as well, with efforts to strip the CIA of its use of "enhanced interrogation methods," which amount to barbaric torture. An independent commission must be established to investigate and publicize the long history of the use of torture and abusive interrogation research and practice by the United States, to ensure that this kind of crime is firmly eradicated and will not happen again. An independent prosecutor should be given full authority to pursue appropriate investigation and indictments.

The time that approaches is one of great opportunity and great danger. Hopefully, U.S. society will rise to the challenges that face it.

[My thanks to Liliana Segura, Marjorie Cohn, and Hina Shamsi for help with this piece. They are not responsible for the opinions or any errors herein, which are entirely my own.]

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How GOP Plans to Defend BushCo on Torture

I don't have any special source within inner Republican Party circles. Nor do I have any particular new insight into the dynamics of how the GOP works out their policy. What I do have is the statement of the Republican minority opinion on the Senate Armed Services Committee's "supposedly bipartisan" report, Inquiry into the Treatment of Detainees in U.S. Custody. In the minority's mix of apologia and attack, we see the outlines of the GOP game-plan for any investigations into Bush crimes under an Obama administration and a Democratic-majority Congress.

The minority statement is endorsed by only about half of the Republican Senators on the Armed Services committee: Saxby Chambliss, R-GA, James Inhofe, R-OK, Jeff Sessions, R-AL, John Cornyn, R-TX, John Thune, R-SD, and Mel Martinez, R-FL. As you read what follows, consider that all of the above voted for the unanimously released report. According to a Washington Post article at the time, the SASC report was originally "sent to the Pentagon with no dissenting views."

But then a week later, the above Senators released their statement, which then made its way into the pages of the National Review. What happened in that intervening week to make them feel the necessity to issue their statement? And what a statement! It essentially accuses the SASC of aiding and abetting U.S. enemies, and endangering U.S. troops. It is my contention that this is how Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld and the whole gang will attempt to "defend" themselves if, and when, any investigations of their crimes are proposed or begun.

The GOP Six begin their aggrieved tirade with a stirring invocation to American ideals:

Throughout our history, even in the gravest of circumstances, the United States has embodied the ideals of individual freedom and liberty. This nation adheres to the principle that all detainees in U.S. custody must be treated humanely and in accordance with applicable law.

Well, as they say, from their mouths to God's ears (so to speak).

Their statement continues (and I want to give them a chance to make their argument here, and thereby hang themselves):

The fallacious assertion, made in recent newspaper editorials and other media outlets, that illegal treatment of detainees was an intentional or necessary result of administration policy is irresponsible and only serves to aid the propaganda and recruitment efforts of extremists dedicated to the murder of innocents and the destruction of our way of life....

The implication, however, that this abuse was the direct, necessary, or foreseeable result of policy decisions made by senior administration officials is false and without merit. It is counter-productive and potentially dangerous to our men and women in uniform to insinuate that illegal treatment of detainees resulted from official U.S. government policies.

Administration officials sought to comply with requests from the field for effective interrogation techniques within the legal constraints in place at the time....

While it is well-documented that the guidelines and orders developed by administration and military officials were not followed in a handful of isolated and well-publicized incidents, and that certain techniques were used in areas and by individuals for which they were not authorized, all credible allegations of abuse by U.S. military personnel were and continue to be taken seriously and investigated in painstaking detail. Where applicable, offenders have been charged, tried, and punished under federal law.

Contrary to the lies and wounded patriotism of the GOP statement, the SASC report painstakingly recounts the timeline whereby President George W. Bush and top officials of his administration, the Pentagon and the CIA, introduced and administered a regime of abusive treatment and torture of prisoners. In order to do so, they had to trash fundamental international law, laws to which the United States was not only a signatory, but formerly a champion.

From the Committee report, released by Senator Carl Levin and Senator John McCain:

On February 7, 2002, President George W. Bush made a written determination that Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions, which would have afforded minimum standards for humane treatment, did not apply to al Qaeda or Taliban detainees. Following the President’s determination, techniques such as waterboarding, nudity, and stress positions, used in SERE training to simulate tactics used by enemies that refuse to follow the Geneva Conventions, were authorized for use in interrogations of detainees in U.S. custody....

Members of the President’s Cabinet and other senior officials participated in meetings inside the White House in 2002 and 2003 where specific interrogation techniques were discussed. National Security Council Principals reviewed the CIA’s interrogation program during that period....

The use of techniques similar to those used in SERE resistance training – such as stripping students of their clothing, placing them in stress positions, putting hoods over their heads, and treating them like animals – was at odds with the commitment to humane treatment of detainees in U.S. custody....

[The Pentagon's] Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) efforts in support of “offensive” interrogation operations went beyond the agency’s knowledge and expertise. JPRA’s support to U.S. government interrogation efforts contributed to detainee abuse. JPRA’s offensive support also influenced the development of policies that authorized abusive interrogation techniques for use against detainees in U.S. custody....

Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld’s authorization of aggressive interrogation techniques for use at Guantanamo Bay was a direct cause of detainee abuse there.

The report also took on the "bad apple" theory of abuse, which was especially relevant to the Abu Ghraib scandal, where the clandestine nature of U.S. abuse was exposed, thanks to a whistleblower, digital photography and the ability to burn CDs. The "bad apple" theory dovetails with more sophisticated psychological research, i.e., that everyday human beings are subject to social pressures and in an abusive context can be easily led to torture. (See articles on Zimbardo's Prisoner experiment, or Milgram's famous obedience experiment, recently replicated.)

As important as these psychological theories are, the abuse at Abu Ghraib was a matter of policy, not character disorder or psychological slippage. The Levin/McCain report concluded that arguments, such as those advanced by the GOP Senators, that the torture was confined to "isolated" incidents, and the perpetrators "charged, tried, and punished," were false:

The abuse of detainees at Abu Ghraib in late 2003 was not simply the result of a few soldiers acting on their own. Interrogation techniques such as stripping detainees of their clothes, placing them in stress positions, and using military working dogs to intimidate them appeared in Iraq only after they had been approved for use in Afghanistan and at GTMO.

The Defense Department had criticized the SASC report, too, at the time of its release. According to a Washington Post story back on December 12, 2008:

A Defense Department spokesman noted that the Pentagon cooperated extensively with the Senate investigation and has taken numerous steps in recent years to ensure the humane treatment of detainees. The steps included a revision of the Army's field manual that establishes the rules for interrogations.

"Any credible allegations of abuse by U.S. military personnel are taken seriously and looked into in painstaking detail," said the spokesman, Bryan Whitman. "If and when applicable, offenders have been punished."

I'd ask my readers to take note of the special place in the Pentagon's narrative of the Army's revision of its interrogation field manual. It's described as one of the "steps" taken "in recent years to ensure the humane treatment of detainees."

The assertion about the Army Field Manual, like those about the adherence to humane standards for treatment of detainees, is a lie. The AFM contains provisions for abusive treatment at variance with humane standards laid down by the Geneva Conventions, including the use of isolation, perceptual deprivation, sleep deprivation, threats, and humiliation. There is not much that separates the AFM in its treatment of prisoners from that proposed by the CIA in its famous KUBARK manual of the early 1960s.

In my next article, I'll dissect further ways in which the struggle against the Pentagon and CIA's use of abusive interrogation techniques now shifts to an assessment of the Army Field Manual, which is being proposed as the new template for all U.S. military and intelligence interrogations.

Also posted at Daily Kos

The Tranformation Scene from R. Strauss' Daphne

Away from the world of hate, violence, and war, if only for an evening...


From the 2005 production at La Fenice Theater in Venice, June Anderson sings Daphne and Stefan Anton Reck conducts.

Israeli Blitzkrieg in Gaza: Background to the Conflict

Today, the news reports that Israel has moved beyond its land/air/sea bombardment of Gaza, which has killed hundreds, including many civilian men, women and children. Tanks, motorized forces and troops have virtually cut the territory in half. While four Israelis have died from Hamas rocket attacks since the invasion began, BBC reports:

According to Hamas officials and witnesses, the main fighting is now centred on four areas: east of the Jabaliya refugee camp; in the Zeitoun neighbourhood to the east of Gaza City; on the coastal road close to the site of the former Jewish settlement of Netzarim, south of Gaza City; and in an uninhabited area in the centre of Gaza.

Hamas said its fighters were in some cases engaged in "face-to-face battles" with Israeli soldiers.

Earlier, the Israeli military said the militants were not engaging its troops in close combat but using mortars and improvised bombs.

The Palestinian health ministry says more than 500 Palestinians, mostly civilians, have now been killed since the Israelis began their assault on Gaza eight days ago. A further 2,500 have been wounded.

Over and over as I watched the Sunday morning pundits on U.S. television "report" on the Gaza invasion, the issue of the rockets sent by Hamas into civilian areas of Israel was repeated over and over. While meant to inspire fear, perhaps, more than destruction, they appear to satisfy the Palestinian need for some kind of self-defensive action, as the population has suffered immensely under an onerous blockade for many months now.

But no one on American television ever mentions this blockade, or the situation in Gaza that predates this invasion. Here is a major excerpt from a report by Amnesty International last August on conditions in Gaza. I offer it in the hope it will be picked up and used in an barrage of understanding and context that will counter U.S. and Israeli propaganda around this terrible and indefensible military action, an action that cannot be described as anything but a war crime.

From the Amnesty report last summer:

TRAPPED - COLLECTIVE PUNISHMENT IN GAZA
27 August 2008

"The Israeli siege has turned Gaza into a big prison. We cannot leave, not even for medical care or to study abroad, and most of what we need is not available in Gaza. We are not living really; we are barely surviving and the outlook for the future is bleak." – Fathi, a Gaza resident.

With Gaza locked down and cut off from the outside world by a stifling Israeli blockade, 46 peace activists from the world over set sail for Gaza on 22 August to, in their words, “break the siege that Israel has imposed on the civilian population of Gaza…, to express our solidarity with the suffering people of Gaza, and to create a free and regular channel between Gaza and the outside world”.

An Israeli peace activist on board the Free Gaza boats, Professor Jeff Halper, said: “The mission is to break the Israeli siege, an absolutely illegal siege which has plunged a million and a half Palestinians into wretched conditions: imprisoned in their own homes, exposed to extreme military violence, deprived of the basic necessities of life, stripped of their most fundamental human rights and dignity. The siege violates the most fundamental principle of international law: the inadmissibility of harming civilian populations… I cannot stand idly aside… To do so would violate my commitment to human rights”.

The blockade imposed by Israel on the Gaza Strip over a year ago has left the entire population of 1.5 million Palestinians trapped with dwindling resources and an economy in ruins. Some 80 per cent of the population now depend on the trickle of international aid that the Israeli army allows in. This humanitarian crisis is man-made and entirely avoidable.

Even patients in dire need of medical treatment not available in Gaza are often prevented from leaving and scores of them have died. Students who have scholarships in universities abroad are likewise trapped in Gaza, denied the opportunity to build a future.

The Israeli authorities argue that the blockade on Gaza is in response to Palestinian attacks, especially the indiscriminate rockets fired from Gaza at the nearby Israeli town of Sderot. These and other Palestinian attacks killed 25 Israelis in the first half of this year; in the same period Israeli forces killed 400 Palestinians.

However, the Israeli blockade does not target the Palestinian armed groups responsible for attacks – it collectively punishes the entire population of Gaza.

In April 2008, Robert Serry, the UN Special Coordinator for the Middle East Peace Process and Personal Representative of the UN Secretary General, called on Israel to restore fuel supplies to Gaza and allow the passage of humanitarian assistance and commercial supplies.

"The collective punishment of the population of Gaza, which has been instituted for months now, has failed," he said.

Though a ceasefire between Israeli forces and Palestinian armed groups has held in Gaza since 19 June 2008, the Israeli blockade remains in place.

Economic collapse and poverty

Israel has banned exports from Gaza altogether and has reduced entry of fuel and goods to a trickle – mostly humanitarian aid, foodstuff and medical supplies. Basic necessities are in short supply or not available at all in Gaza. The shortages have pushed up food prices at a time when people can least afford to pay more. A growing number of Gazans have been pushed into extreme poverty and suffer from malnutrition.

Some 80 per cent of the population now depends on international aid, compared to 10 per cent a decade ago. The restrictions imposed by Israel have resulted in higher operational costs for UN aid agencies and humanitarian organizations. Food assistance costs the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA) US$20 per person per day compared to less than US$8 in 2004.

Gaza’s fragile economy, already battered by years of restrictions and destruction, has collapsed. Unable to import raw materials and to export produce and without fuel to operate machinery and electricity generators, some 90 per cent of industry has shut down.

Essential services jeopardized

The fuel shortage has affected every aspect of life in Gaza. Patients’ hospital attendance has dropped because of lack of transport and universities were forced to shut down before the end of the school year as students and teachers could not continue to travel to them. Fuel-powered pumps for wells and water distribution networks are often not working.

Medical facilities in Gaza lack the specialized staff and equipment to treat a range of conditions, such as cancer and cardiovascular disease. In addition, hospitals are now under ever greater pressure, as they face shortages of equipment, spare parts and other necessary supplies as a result of the blockade.

With the ceasefire holding, the suffering in Gaza has fallen off the international news agenda....

"... fallen off the international news agenda"... but not for long it seems.

Meanwhile, the Times of India reports that Israel has detained two reporters from Al-Jazeera. The Supreme Court of Israel had to intervene to oppose the military's refusal to allow any journalists in to report on the situation inside Gaza itself, but the government continues to sabotage such efforts, and no reporters have yet made their way to the battlefield. Again... no comment from the U.S. big, "free" press.

Here's the latest from Al-Jazeera itself:

The International Committee for the Red Cross said on Sunday its medical emergency team had been prevented for a third day from entering the territory.

Egypt has also completely closed the Rafah crossing, cutting off aid supplies to the territory.

The UN has warned that there were "critical gaps" in aid reaching Gaza, despite claims from Tzipi Livni, the Israeli foreign minister, that there was no crisis and that aid was getting through.

However, Christopher Gunness, the UN Relief and Works Agency (Unrwa) spokesman said the idea that there is no humanitarian crisis is absurd.

"The organization for which I work - Unrwa - has approximately 9-10,000 workers on the ground. They are speaking with the ordinary civilians in Gaza... People are suffering. A quarter of all those being killed now are civilians. So when I hear people say we're doing our best to avoid civilian casualties that rings very hollow indeed."

Elsewhere in the strip, heavy artillery, tracer fire and rockets could be heard while reports said Israeli troops had reached the northern towns of Beit Lahiya and Beit Hanoun.

Soldiers and fighters were also locked in gun battles east of the Hamas stronghold of Zeitoun.