BAGHDAD, Iraq (CNN) -- Baghdad was on virtual lockdown Friday as a tough new curfew ordered everyone off the streets of the Iraqi capital and five other cities until 5 p.m. Sunday.Chris Floyd has his own take on "Operation Permanent Presence."
Iraqis survey damage to their home Friday in Baghdad's Sadr City after residents reported a U.S. airstrike.
1 of 3 That restriction didn't stop someone from firing rockets and mortar rounds into the capital's heavily fortified International Zone, commonly known as the Green Zone. One slammed into the office of one of Iraq's vice presidents, Tareq al-Hashemi, killing two guards.
Confidential memo from Maj. Gen. Kelly, commander of US forces in western Iraq (MNF-W, or Multi-National Force — West), written in late February 2008. Privately verified by Wikileaks staff and not denied or contradicted by MNF-W when questioned by UPI's national security editor, Shaun Waterman.While Bush and his media toadies tout Anbar province as a "success" story for the "surge" and his predatory Iraq occupation in general, the conditions in the city jail speak a far different reality: of an inept, corrupt satrapy of a government, whose imperial masters flatter and support. Leave the jails with starving prisoners, says the "democratic" coalition. "Let them solve their own problems," announce the haughty leaders of the "free" world. In the degenerated world of modern America, freedom means, of course, freedom to starve.
Typed up version follows:MNF-W COMMANDER'S COMMENTS
I spent the entire day inspecting the Fallujah city jail. I found the conditions there to be exactly (unbelivable over crowding, total lack of anything approaching even minimal levels of hygiene for human beings, no food, little water, no ventilation) to those described in the recent (18 February) FOX news artickle [sic] by Michael Totten entitled the "Dungeon of Fallujah". When queried the iraqis and marines present throughout my inspection as to why these conditions existed, three conditions were universaly cited as problems in Fallujah as well as the rest of Anbar. First, there is zero support from the government for any of the jails in Anbar. No funds, food or medical support has been provided from any ministry. Second, the police that run Anbar's jails are the same personnel responsable for investigating crimes. These jailer/investigators are undermanned and more often than not spend most of their time out begging and scavenging for food than investigating crimes. (It is unlikely the prisoners will eat today). Third, Anbar lacks trained Iraqi correctional officers (ICOS) to run the jails in Anbar. The development and employment of trained ICOS would enable the IP to focus on criminal investigation rather then jail supervision. I believe the Iraqi police are doing the best they can, and they literally begged me on humanitarian, moral and religious grounds to help them help the prisoners by somehow moving the government to action.
We need to go to general quarters on this issue right now. There are four areas that MNF-W needs immediate support with to correst these deficiencies. First, GOI must provide funfing support to provide care for Iraqi prisoners in Iraqi custody in Anbar. To state that the current system is broken would erroneously imply that there is a system in place to be broken. Most jails in Anbar have a mixed prisoner population of pre-trial prisoners and post-trial convicted prisoners. The ministry of Justice the latter. Since the Anbar jail population is mixed of interior and the ministry of Justice (MOJ). Second, Anbar needs ICO trainers to establish an ICO course in Anbar to develop and employ that capability province wide. Third, Anbar lacks a director general of MOJ for the province. Anbar needs one appointed and working in Anbar as soon as possible. Fourth, Iraqi security force funds (ISFF) must be made available to upgrade a majority of the correctional facilities within Anbar to comply with basic international standarts of care for prisoners.
One of the main goals of MNF-W is to successfully transition the IP from a security force to a professional law enforcement force. The Iraqi police will ultimately be the ones whose shoulders the burden of winning or losing the fight will be carried. To date, little attention has been paid to the Iraqi corrections system in Anbar and its current discrepancies will prevent the IP from becoming a professional law enforcement force unless immediate and significant support is provided. As I understand it the coalition has absolutely no authority to direct what goes on in these "facilities", and when we have intervened recently in other jails with the same conditions we have been criticized for not making the Iraqis solve their own problems. The conditions in these jails are so bad that I think we need to either take a TF-134 approach and that is to do the right thing in terms of caring for the prisoners even with our own dollars, or release them.
...so long as I'm president to make sure that those lives were not lost in vain, that in fact there is an outcome that will merit the sacrifice"...He, of course, means that the superprofits from exploitation of oil will be assured to the ruling class he serves. That the influence of the American bankers, industrialists, and its military machine, will not be subjected to the imprecations and influence of some smaller, merely nationalist entity, nor to the competitive combines of larger, more powerful nation states, such as France or Germany or China. As the largest child stands on the top of the hill, surveying the carnage of his peers who lie in the dust about him, Bush swears the sacrifice worth it. Except the analogy is flawed, as he is not the bloodied king of the hill, but the thoroughly corrupt leader of a government that lost its way in the labryinth of imperial lust a long time ago.
Can we possibly suppose that if governments had originated in a right principle, and had not an interest in pursuing a wrong one, the world could have been in the wretched and quarrelsome condition we have seen it? What inducement has the farmer, while following the plough, to lay aside his peaceful pursuit, and go to war with the farmer of another country? or what inducement has the manufacturer? What is dominion to them, or to any class of men in a nation? Does it add an acre to any man's estate, or raise its value? Are not conquest and defeat each of the same price, and taxes the never-failing consequence? — Though this reasoning may be good to a nation, it is not so to a government. War is the Faro-table of governments, and nations the dupes of the game.And the pawns of war are its refugees. In Iraq, the "success" of Bush's martial "surge" is belied by the attitude of the millions of refugees that previously fled the carnage imposed by the U.S. invasion and the resultant ethnic cleansing, as the U.S. maneuvered between the warring factions of a shattered society.
DAMASCUS, Syria: The much-heralded stream of Iraqi refugees back home to Iraq from Syria has slowed to a trickle, with many fearing that life in their homeland is still too dangerous despite improvements in security....And so the great sacrifice of Bush comes full circle to the idealization of a tyrant that his own country put into power, deposed, and now restores to martyrdom. And this "noble" cause, this Iraq War of the Republicans and their Democratic Party enablers, claims its 4000th American corpse. The Iraqi bodies are not even counted by Bush and his government. That sacrifice might overwhelm the flimsy temple Bush is building for his unholy war.
"To think of returning to Iraq is as bad as thinking of suicide," said Faten al-Samerrai, 42, who has been living in Damascus since 2006 with her husband and five children. "There is no future and no life in Iraq. There is only ruin."
She said life is not perfect in Damascus — but at least it's safe....
"I lost my son and my husband because of America," said Ikhlas al-Duleimi, a 36-year-old Sunni Muslim Iraqi in Syria. She added: "I wish Saddam's awful regime would return."
Human intelligence has its limits, and not only can a man not know everything, but he cannot even know in its entirety the little that other men know. Since the contrary of every false proposition is a truth, the number of truths is as unfathomable as the number of errors. We must, therefore, choose what to teach as well as when to teach it. Of the knowledge within our reach some is false, some is useless, some merely serves to feed the pride of him who has it....
Beware of the specious attraction of falsehood and the intoxicating fumes of pride. Remember, remember always, that ignorance never did any harm, that error alone is fatal, and that we do not lose our way because of what we do not know but because of what we think we know.
Valtin is correct. The February 22 APA statement entirely conforms to current US policy of lip service in public and war crimes in private.Go read his entire comment.
Many institutional factors combine to defeat APA principles on interrogation in national security settings under the Bush Administration....APA leadership knows what it's doing in sending lobbyists around the country, weakening any resolution, bill, or determined effort to stop the psychological presence at DoD and CIA torture sessions. This keeps the APA in the good graces of Pentagon and intelligence agency high echelon. It also destroys whatever claims APA has to being an organization that stands for anything progressive, or even represents the beneficent practice of psychology in America.
In intelligence operations, information is passed to participants strictly on a “need to know” basis. Inasmuch as the February 2008 Modification prohibits psychologists from “knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques,” it is a simple matter to withhold morally relevant information from psychologists and to provide cover stories....
Last month, the testimony of a soldier identified only as "OC-1," accidentally released to the public, showed that another fighter was alive inside the Afghan compound where the 2002 firefight took place and a grenade was thrown at U.S. soldiers, killing one of them. Until last month's revelation, it had long been assumed that Mr. Khadr was the only person alive inside the compound, and so must have thrown the grenade. Mr. Khadr now faces multiple charges in connection to the incident, including murder.The Globe and Mail article goes on to describe the political circumstance surrounding the decision to put Khadr on trial, while another article on the case at Adelaide Now details new charges concerning the treatment of Khadr in U.S. custody.
The U.S. officer's diary, snippets of which were made public this week, confirms the OC-1 account that another fighter was alive....
"I remember looking over my right shoulder and seeing [edited out by government] just waste the guy who was still alive. He was shooting him with controlled pairs..." the officer writes, referring to bursts of gunfire.
"On several occasions at Bagram, interrogators threatened to have me raped, or sent to other countries like Egypt, Syria, Jordan or Israel to be raped," Khadr said in the document.Omar said in his recently released affidavit that he said whatever he could think of to stop the brutal interrogations, in which he was shackled for hours at a time, and not allowed to use a bathroom, to the point he urinated on himself. Until a Canadian judge refused access to Khadr by Canadian intelligence officers, because conditions at Guantanamo failed to meet the criteria of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Canadian interrogators failed to intervene to stop any abuse. They were there, in part, to try and get the teenage Khadr to implicate Canadian torture rendition victim Maher Arar, among others, proving that Bush's "war on terror" torture campaign is an international affair.
He said interrogators told him at one point that the Egyptians wound send "Soldier No. 9" to rape him....
"While my wounds were still healing, interrogators made me clean the floors on my hands and knees. They woke me up in the middle of the night after midnight and made me clean the floor with a brush and dry it with towels until dawn, carry heavy buckets of water," he said.
Later at Guantanamo, Khadr said an Afghan with a US flag on his pants threatened to send him back to Afghanistan unless he cooperated, telling him: "They like small boys in Afghanistan."
I think Chris Rock said it best when he said, "to blacks, America is like an uncle who paid your way through college, but molested you." This quip reflects our (African American’s) recognition of the vast benefits living in America has provided us which we are truly grateful for, but it also acknowledges that we haven’t forgotten, the travesties that America inflicted on our race.Travesties like slavery, lynching, and segregation, laws against miscegenation, Nazi-like experimentation (Tuskegee), mandatory sterilization laws. And most of this, slavery aside, within the lifetimes of many Americans. It was only thirty or more years ago that the government's FBI targeted Black leaders with its COINTELPRO program, which included blackmail, the use of agents provocateur, and assassination.
The Pentagon study based on more than 600,000 documents recovered after US and UK troops toppled Hussein in 2003, discovered "no 'smoking gun' (ie, direct connection) between Saddam's Iraq and al-Qaida", its authors wrote.The Pentagon played this trick a few years back, when it declared "secret" another report that showed negligence in planning for post-war Iraqi reconstruction. The document was deemed officially "of limited value." Yes, for the mandarins and demagogues that rule this country, the truth is "of limited value." At least for now, we have ABC's posting of an executive summary of the current Saddam-Al Qaida report.
George Bush and his senior aides have made numerous attempts to link Saddam Hussein and Al Qaeda terror in their justification for waging war against Iraq.
Wary of embarrassing press coverage noting that the new study debunks those claims, the US defence department attempted to bury the release of the report yesterday.
The Pentagon cancelled a planned briefing on the study and scrapped plans to post its findings on the internet, ABC news reported. Unclassified copies of the study would be sent to interested individuals in the mail, military officials told the network.
The Defense Department is conducting an extensive review of the videotaping of interrogations at military facilities from Iraq to Guantánamo Bay, and so far it has identified nearly 50 tapes, including one that showed what a military spokesman described as the forcible gagging of a terrorism suspect....You can bet that there were a lot more than 50 videotapes, and as for audio tapes? Well, no one's even asking, so there must be hundreds. (The CIA 1960s interrogation manual, KUBARK, suggested taping interrogations as a routine matter.) But I suppose when the Pentagon finishes its "review" we won't be seeing it posted online or published anytime soon.
The review was intended in part to establish clearer rules for any videotaping of interrogations, Defense officials said. But they acknowledged that it had been complicated by inconsistent taping practices in the past, as well as uncertain policies for when tapes could be destroyed or must be preserved.
For half a century one of the most closely guarded state secrets of the United States government has been its large-scale field experiments with biological weapons during the Korean War. This secrecy is perhaps not surprising since, as a prominent American scholar has noted, if it is shown that the US engaged in germ warfare then it will also be shown that the US in the eyes of most of the world has committed a major international war crime... Such an admission would be an intolerable blow to the prestige of a government and a nation many of whose citizens believe that the United States is the natural moral and human rights leader of the world....The article, like the book, is copiously documented, and the authors, admitting they have no "smoking gun" document, nevertheless build a powerful case for the use of these weapons. I'll spend some time in future articles giving more details to their thesis.
The Air Force was assigned the primary operational role in biological warfare. The directorate of the air force biological weapons program during the Korean War was divided into two parts, both parts reporting separately to Lt-Gen. T. D. White, deputy chief of staff for operations. The task of the first part, known as the US Air Force BW-CW Division (with an acronym AFOAT-BW) under Colonel Frank Seiler, was to establish an overt biological warfare capability for the emergency general war plan against the Soviet Union referred to earlier... Initial capability within this plan was phased in by March 1952 but it was plagued with difficulties, shortage of refrigeration facilities for the brucellosis pathogen and fell short of expectations.
But there was another part. The second part was hidden in the Psychological Warfare Division of the air force under the command of Colonel John J. Hutchison and its tasks were to direct and supervise covert operations 'in the scope of unconventional BW and CW operations and programs,' and to 'integrate capabilities and requirements' for biological warfare and chemical warfare into war plans... Our understanding about what was going on in the Korean War was the covert experimental testing of biological weapons within the objectives of the emergency war plan, with the added advantage these weapons might serve some tactical purpose in the war.
Limiting the C.I.A.’s interrogation methods to those in the Army field manual would be dangerous because the manual is publicly available and easily accessible on the Internet. Shortly after 9/11, we learned that key Al Qaida operatives had been trained to resist the methods outlined in the manual. And this is why we created alternative procedures to question the most dangerous Al Qaida operatives, particularly those who might have knowledge of attacks planned on our homeland. The best source of information about terrorist attacks is the terrorists themselves. If we were to shut down this program and restrict the C.I.A. to methods in the field manual, we could lose vital information from senior Al Qaida terrorists, and that could cost American lives.While Bush touts various terrorist operations foiled by use of torture, a major Congressional player had a different view:
Sen. Jay Rockefeller, chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, said he had heard nothing to suggest that the CIA, through enhanced interrogation methods, had obtained information to thwart a terrorist attack.Secrets, Secrets, Secrets... Shhh!
In a memo to CIA employees Saturday, CIA Director Michael Hayden said the Army Field Manual does not "exhaust the universe" of lawful interrogation techniques. ""There are methods in the CIA's program that have been briefed to our oversight committees, are fully consistent with the Geneva Convention and current U.S. law and are most certainly not torture," Hayden wrote.We are very, very far from cleaning up this mess. In the choice between secret CIA torture and its somewhat cleaned up Army Field Manual version, there's very little to make a human rights advocate very happy. The Democratic candidates have made some stir that they would change things, stop the torture, and from Obama, the secret renditions, too; restore habeas corpus, etc. But they aren't exactly out front on the issue, and seem susceptible to military influence, and threats they are "too soft" on "terrorism."
After failing to anticipate Hamas’s victory over Fatah in the 2006 Palestinian election, the White House cooked up yet another scandalously covert and self-defeating Middle East debacle: part Iran-contra, part Bay of Pigs. With confidential documents, corroborated by outraged former and current U.S. officials, David Rose reveals how President Bush, Condoleezza Rice, and Deputy National-Security Adviser Elliott Abrams backed an armed force under Fatah strongman Muhammad Dahlan, touching off a bloody civil war in Gaza and leaving Hamas stronger than ever.I'm just getting to this now, but it seems like a must read.
In a major step for the U.S. labor movement, the International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) has announced that it will shut down West Coast ports on May 1, to demand an immediate end to the war and occupation in Iraq and Afghanistan and the withdrawal of U.S. troops from the Middle East. This is the first time in decades that an American union has decided to undertake industrial action against a U.S. war. The action announced by the powerful West Coast dock workers union, to stop work to stop the war, should be taken up by unions and labor organizations throughout the United States and internationally. And the purpose of such actions should be not to beg the bourgeois politicians whose hands are covered with blood, having voted for every war budget for six and a half years, but a show of strength of the working people who make this country run, and who can shut it down!Leftist propaganda and wishful thinking? or the beginning of a mass popular movement against the war, with real roots in the working class? Another leftist paper noted this action earlier this year:
OAKLAND—Three ships sat idle at the Stevedoring Services of America (SSA) terminals on May 19 as dock workers dispatched by International Longshore and Warehouse Union (ILWU) Local 10 and clerks dispatched by ILWU Local 34 honored a picket line protesting the Iraq war....Stay tuned.
Among the picketers was a union contingent from the Oakland Education Association (OEA).
The FISA is a classically Kafka-esque court that operates in total secrecy. Only the Government, and nobody else, is permitted to attend, participate, and make arguments. Only the Government is permitted to access or know about the decisions issued by that court. Rather than the judges being assigned randomly and therefore fairly, they are hand-picked by the Chief Justice (who has been a GOP-appointee since FISA was enacted) and are uniformly the types of judges who evince great deference to the Government. As a result, the FISA court has been notorious for decades for mindlessly rubber-stamping every single Government request to eavesdrop on whomever they want. Just look at this chart (h/t Arthur Silber) for the full, absurd picture.Need I say... go read the whole article!
Yet now, embracing this secret, one-sided, slavishly pro-government court defines the outermost liberal or "pro-civil-liberty" view permitted in our public discourse. And indeed, as reports of imminent (and entirely predictable) House Democratic capitulation on the FISA bill emerge, the FISA court is now actually deemed by the establishment to be too far to the Left -- too much of a restraint on our increasingly omnipotent surveillance state. Anyone who believes that we should at the very least have those extremely minimal -- really just symbolic -- limitations on our Government's ability to spy on us in secret is now a far Leftist....
When FISA was first unveiled at the height of the Cold War, it was publicly supported by what a May 23, 1977, pro-FISA Washington Post Editorial described as "leaders of the intelligence community and Congress"....
But opposition to FISA -- in many civil libertarian and even conservative circles -- was fierce, not on the ground that it imposed too many restrictions on Government eavesdropping but on the opposite ground: that FISA gave legal sanction to sweeping, excessive, unchecked government power to spy on Americans....
The political establishment today knows only one viewpoint: literally no limits are tolerable on the power of the loving, protective Surveillance State.
Eternal Spirit of the chainless Mind!
Brightest in dungeons, Liberty! thou art,
For there in thy habitation is the heart
The heart which love of thee alone can bind;
And when thy sons to fetters are consign'd -
To fetters, and the damp vault's dayless gloom
Their country conquers with their martyrdom,
And Freedom's fame finds wings on every wind.
Chillon! thy prison is a holy place,
And thy sad floor an altar - for t'was trod
Until his very steps have left a trace
Worn, as if thy cold pavement were a sod
By Bonnivard! May none those marks efface!
For they appeal from tyranny to God.
More than one in 100 adults in the United States is in jail or prison, an all-time high that is costing state governments nearly $50 billion a year and the federal government $5 billion more, according to a report released yesterday.How can such figures mesh with any view of the U.S. as a country of free men and women? You don't have to be a penal expert to know that besides having a racist justice system, the rise in incarceration is due to obscene drug laws, mandatory minimum sentencing, the draconian three-strikes-and-you're-out laws passed by demagogic politicians and a frightened populace, and petty, tyrannical probation enforcement. As a result, there are more than one million non-violent offenders locked away in the U.S. prison system. Jailing people is a big industry in the U.S., and like any capitalist enterprise, the prison-industrial complex is always seeking new markets and greater expansion.
With more than 2.3 million people behind bars, the United States leads the world in both the number and percentage of residents it incarcerates, leaving far-more-populous China a distant second, according to a study by the nonpartisan Pew Center on the States.
The growth in prison population is largely because of tougher state and federal sentencing imposed since the mid-1980s. Minorities have been particularly affected: One in nine black men ages 20 to 34 is behind bars. For black women ages 35 to 39, the figure is one in 100, compared with one in 355 for white women in the same age group.
As the government invokes national security to sweep up and jail an unprecedented number of immigrants, the private-prison industry is booming. In the aftermath of the September 11th attacks on New York, immigrants have become the fastest growing segment of the prison population in the U.S. today. In fiscal year 2005, more than 350,000 immigrants went through the courts. "A growing share of them committed no crimes while in the United States - 53 percent this year, up from 37 percent in 2001 - even though Bush administration officials repeatedly have said their priority is deporting criminals," the Denver Post reported....One example of this new privatization of prisons is the new prison built by the for-profit Corrections Corporation of America (CCA), "one of the nation's biggest prison companies", in Florence, Arizona:
The government claims that locking up people without legal status is the only way to ensure that they do not disappear into the country. A December 2004 DHS report from the Office of the Inspector General concluded that all the evidence proved the “importance of detention in relation to the eventual removal of an alien. Hence effective management of detention bed space can substantially contribute to immigration enforcement efforts.”
The speed and scope of the Bush administration round up and jailing of non-citizens created a dramatically increased need for immigrant detention space. And saved the flailing corrections industry.
The complex in Florence is part of a 300-facility-strong network of immigrant incarceration facilities. The average time an immigrant is detained is 42.5 days from arrest to deportation. At $85 a day per detainee, that adds up to $3,612.50 per person. In 2003, DHS was holding 231,500 detainees, and the budget to cover this was $1.3 billion. Since 2001, the DHS budget for detention bed space has increased each fiscal year as has the number of beds. In 2003 there was more than $50 million slated for the construction of immigrant jails....This trafficking in prisoners demonstrates how deep the moral rot has penetrated this society. The U.S. as a society has truly lost its soul. The leaders of this country seem to be bound and determined to realize concretely the prophecy of Rousseau made in the years before both the French and American Revolutions:
For the second quarter of 2005, CCA announced that its revenue had increased three percent over last year, for a total of almost $300 million. CCA calculates that it expenditure of $28.89 per inmate, per day allows it to make a daily profit of $50.26 per inmate....
Business is good for CCA and the more people it stuffs into its prisons the better it becomes. "As you know, the first 100 inmates into a facility, we lose money, and the last 100 inmates into a facility we make a lot of money." CCA Chief Financial Officer Irving Lingo said on a 2006 company conference call.
Man is born free, but he is everywhere in chains.
Polonius: What do you read, my lord?Sometimes it seems as if it is raining news and analysis. A number of good articles have appeared lately on the subject of U.S. torture. David Goodman's "The Enablers" over at Mother Jones is one of a number of articles in a special MJ series on torture. Goodman's article focuses on the fight within the American Psychological Association (APA) over psychologist participation in military and CIA interrogations of "enemy combatants." It's very good, fairly up-to-date, and puts the controversy into some historical context.
Hamlet: Words, words, words.
Polonius: What is the matter, my lord?
Hamlet: Between who?
The APA is touting how the new 2007 resolution prohibits "specific techniques sometimes used in interrogations and calling on the U.S. government to ban their use"....Soldz and Olson described their reaction at the 2007 convention when APA Council brought forth their "substitute" resolution, written precisely to replace a bureaucratically-blocked resolution proposed months earlier calling for a moratorium against any psychologist participation at interrogation sites. They read the language around "definitions" of torture and cruel, abusive and inhuman behavior:
Looking back at APA's long list of prohibited techniques we see something strange in the wording. The first part of the list are odious forms of obvious torture. "Techniques" that are "unequivocally condemned" include rape, mock executions, waterboarding, etc. Note, however, that use of "psychotropic drugs or mind-altering substances" are prohibited in instances where they are "used for the purpose of eliciting information". If they are used to sedate or "soften up" a detainee prior to the questioning, drugs are apparently not prohibited.
Even worse is what comes next: a subset of other techniques are also singled out as prohibited when they are "used for the purposes of eliciting information in an interrogation process". These are "hooding, forced nakedness, stress positions, the use of dogs to threaten or intimidate, physical assault including slapping or shaking, exposure to extreme heat or cold, threats of harm or death".
A third subset of "prohibited" techniques concerns sensory deprivation and overstimulation, and sleep deprivation. Here, the APA goes completely off the rails. They define these techniques to be prohibited only if "used in a manner that represents significant pain or suffering or in a manner that a reasonable person would judge to cause lasting harm". (Emphasis mine)
We remember clearly our shock at first observing this careful parsing of allowed degrees of suffering. We remember such insertions mysteriously occurring overnight before the Council vote. We recall how upset we were with this new language that was in such brazen contrast to the APA Ethics Code's injunction to "do no harm." We also remember our group of APA critics not being able to keep ourselves from wondering "Who pulled strings to get these phrases inserted?"Opponents of APA collaboration with U.S. torture jumped on the wording of the disputed paragraph. Yet, introduced by representatives of APA's military psychology division, the Council resolution, with its weak and misleading language, passed easily. And that's where things sat for a number of months, as revelations mounted in the press about abusive conditions of confinement at Guantanamo's Camp Delta, about CIA use of waterboarding, and the participation of foreign countries in the U.S. "extraordinary rendition" program. Capping it all off, there was the circus of Attorney General Mukasey's testimony before Congress, with Bush's number one legal officer unable to make up his mind about whether waterboarding represented torture or not.
In the wake of these revelations, a growing number of APA members have protested by withholding dues. In August [2007], Mary Pipher, author of the best-selling Reviving Ophelia, returned her APA Presidential Citation. And a stream of prominent APA members are resigning, including Kenneth Pope, the former chair of the organization's ethics committee, who quit in February. In addition, at least six college psychology departments -- Earlham, Guilford, Smith, University of Rhode Island, California State University at Long Beach, and York College of the City University of New York -- have gone on record saying it was a violation of professional ethics for psychologists to participate in interrogations in any prison outside the U.S. where prisoners are not afforded due process. And in January, the California State Senate Committee on Business, Professions, and Economic Development passed a resolution discouraging California licensed health professionals from participating in detainee interrogations.(As a gesture demonstrating my wish to be open about any bias I may have, I should add that I resigned from the APA myself earlier this year.)
...they made significant contributions to the study of the effects of sensory deprivation on hallucinations, attitude change, emotions, motor behavior, and cognition. Perhaps their most important work has been in the area of the measurement of affect and subjective stress... (p. 10)I presume Strickland and his military/CIA partners are counting on the fact that sensory deprivation can be banned in name only, but still be practiced in the field. How do they do this? By simply claiming, as is done in the new Army Field Manual, that what they are doing is not sensory deprivation, even when they are applying special goggles and mittens to detainees, taking a page right out of the Donald Hebb SD playbook.
The famous picture of then-defendant Jose Padilla being taken from his cell in goggles illustrates the technique quite well.We must, together with other health professions, come together as part of a truth and reconciliation process to publicly clarify the roles of psychologists and other health and mental health professionals in the production of harm. We must publicly admit and apologize for the use of psychological knowledge and expertise in detention and interrogation abuses. Until we clarify and personally accept the extent to which our profession and our professional association has condoned or abetted these and other abuses committed during this so-called "war on terrorism," we will have done little to learn what went wrong, and little to make the moral and institutional changes necessary to prevent their recurrence.For further reading, please see this recent article, "The ethics of interrogation and the American Psychological Association: A critique of policy and process", by Brad Olson, Stephen Soldz, and Martha Davis.
"After centuries of oppression, may the revolution which has just taken place across the sea, by offering to all the inhabitants of Europe asylum against fanaticism and tyranny, teach those who govern men about the legitimate use of their authority! May those courageous Americans, who preferred to see their wives assaulted, their children butchered, their homes destroyed, their fields ravaged, their towns burned, to spill their blood and to die, rather than lose even a tiny portion of their liberty, prevent the enormous growth and the unequal distribution of wealth, extravagance, indolence, and corruption, and guarantee the maintenance of their liberty and the duration of their government. May they defer (at least for several centuries), the judgment pronounced against all the things of this world, the judgment which condemned them to have their birth, their period of strength, their decrepitude, and their end.
"Adversity employs great talents; prosperity renders them useless and carries the inept, the corrupted wealthy and the wicked to the top. May they bear in mind that virtue often contains the seeds of tyranny. May they bear in mind that it is neither gold nor even a multitude of arms that sustains a state, but its morals. May each of them keep in his house, in a corner of his field, next to his workbench, next to his plow, his gun, his sword and his bayonet. May they all be soldiers. May they bear in mind that in circumstances where deliberation is possible, the advice of old men is good, but that in moments of crisis youth is generally better informed than its elders."
The whistleblower site Wikileaks.org may resume its U.S. operation following a hearing in California federal court today, where Judge Jeffrey S. White dissolved a previous order that required the site to be taken offline and indicated he would not approve a second order prohibiting the site's publication.I've just checked, and wikileaks.org is definitely back up and online at its old address. Anyone who still wants to contribute to Wikileaks defense fund can probably still do so by by emailing supporters@sunshinepress.org with their pledge.
The Feb. 15 orders had required domain name service provider Dynadot to cut off access to the Wikileaks site, disabling the Web address. A Swiss bank had asked the court to require the site to be taken down, arguing it disclosed private banking records.
Acting as a friend of the court, The Reporters Committee for Freedom of the Press and several other media organizations asked the judge earlier this week to take notice of the prior restraint that occurred as a result of those orders. Wikileaks had not appeared in court to defend against charges by the bank that it had improperly posted private information and no First Amendment concerns were raised before the Court.
White's order of today dissolved the injunction that had prohibited Dynadot from allowing Wikileaks.org to be accessible. It also "tentatively" denied the bank's request for an order that would keep Wikileaks from independently publishing itself online.
"It's not very often a federal judge does a 180 degree turn in a case and dissolves an order," said Reporters Committee Executive Director Lucy A. Dalglish. "But we're very pleased the judge recognized the constitutional implications in this prior restraint."
White is expected to issue a full opinion on the matter in the near future. The media coalition's brief in the case can be found at: www.rcfp.org/news/documents/20080229-amicusbrie.pdf
Ben Griffin could be jailed if he makes further disclosures about how people seized by special forces were allegedly mistreated and ended up in secret prisons in breach of the Geneva conventions and international law.At least hundreds of Afghans and Iraqis have been swept up in the program run with British and American special forces, and sent to prisons in countries often thousands of miles away to face torture and indefinite detention. Other European countries, including most recently Romania and Poland, have been implicated in the rendition program.
After the invasion of Iraq in 2003 this joint US/UK task force appeared. Its primary mission was to kill or capture high value targets. Individuals detained by this Task Force often included non-combatants caught up in the search for high value targets. The use of secret detention centres within Iraq has negated the need to use Guantanamo Bay whilst allowing similar practice to go unnoticed.Griffin joins U.S. whistleblower Sibel Edmonds in being gagged from speaking about what they know about illegal activities by their governments or their agents. It's clear that the U.S. and their allies are ratcheting up the machinery of governmental repression against those who would oppose their criminal policies. This story has failed to make a stir in either the U.S. mainstream or alternative press or blogosphere. In the world of American Empire, those who would speak out against blatant transgressions of justice and human decency are silenced. It is only a matter of time until they become non-people, a process already begun with the implementation of off-the-books "ghost prisoners," such as those the CIA held at Abu Ghraib, and the hundreds or thousands more who have been sent without hope of appeal to foreign dungeons around the world.
As UK soldiers within this Task Force a policy that we would detain individuals but not arrest them was continually enforced. Since it was commonly assumed by my colleagues that anyone we detained would subsequently be tortured this policy of detention and not arrest was regarded as a clumsy legal tool used to distance British soldiers from the whole process.
During the many operations conducted to apprehend high value targets numerous non-combatants were detained and interrogated in direct contravention of the Geneva Convention regarding the treatment of civilians in occupied territories. I have no doubt in my mind that non-combatants I personally detained were handed over to the Americans and subsequently tortured.
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Written largely by the most prestigious British scientist of his day, this report was effectively suppressed upon its release in 1952. Publi...
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