PHR to Obama on the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights

Physicians for Human Rights has written a powerful letter to President-elect Obama, calling on "the incoming Obama administration to commit to fulfilling the promise of the entire Declaration and its expansive understanding of universal human rights." The letter notes that Obama's election represented a "triumph over prejudice and... a great stride in the long
march toward equality and dignity."

PHR's letter contains many important points on reestablishing human rights norms and recommitting to investing in global health, especially "women’s rights and health, and the health workforce needs of disease-burdened countries." But I was especially impressed on their section on torture, reprinted below:

Ensure that the prohibition against torture will be unambiguously enforced and that health professionals are no longer involved in interrogations.

Your administration should establish through an executive order a uniform standard that acknowledges international law prohibiting torture, namely Common Article 3 of the Geneva Convention and the UN Convention Against Torture. Such a standard should govern all U.S. agencies responsible for interrogating detainees, and must prohibit torture and all abusive techniques. The new standard should eliminate all loopholes that might allow torture, including the use of isolation, sleep deprivation, and sensory deprivation as contained in Appendix M of the 2006 U.S. Army Field Manual on Human Intelligence Collection (Army Field Manual 2-22.3). The U.S. must immediately disclose to the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) the identity and whereabouts of all prisoners who either are or have been in U.S. custody since September 11, 2001. All detention sites must be made available for unscheduled and unrestricted monitoring by the ICRC.

Your administration should also establish an appropriate accountability mechanism, such as a non-partisan commission equipped with subpoena power, to expose and investigate evidence of torture and cruel treatment, and make recommendations on prosecutions for any crimes committed. The commission should have a specific subgroup to address abuses against detainees that involved participation of health professionals and violations of professional ethics. Detainees released from U.S. custody at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere must no longer be transferred to countries where, according to the State Department Human Rights Report, severe human rights abuses may occur.

Your administration should work with the American Psychological Association to implement its September 2008 referendum prohibiting the involvement of psychologists in illegal interrogations. The government must never engage health professionals to undertake interrogation-related activities that violate individuals’ human rights or professional ethics.

Administration officials must also ensure that those who experienced torture and cruel treatment while in U.S. custody have access to reparations, including an official apology, compensation, and appropriate care, including psycho-social services. Your administration should adopt a new policy for responding to hunger strikers at detention centers that complies with international standards of medical ethics, thereby abandoning the current policy of forcefeeding.

We urge your administration to return to the previous standard for detainee medical treatment, in place in prior to 2003, ensuring that their healthcare is parallel to that provided to U.S. soldiers.

I've highlighted the section on Appendix M of the Army Field Manual, as its inclusion dooms the document as any kind of satisfying or legitimate replacement for the CIA's torture techniques, even if does ban some of the more egregious SERE-like tortures, like waterboarding and stress positions.

The entire subject has taken on ominous overtones with the statements of House Intelligence Committee Chairman, Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas. As reported by Glenn Greenwald today, quoting GovernmentExecutive.com:

The House Intelligence Committee's top Democrat [Rep. Silvestre Reyes of Texas] said Tuesday he has recommended that President-elect Barack Obama keep the country's current national intelligence director and CIA chief in place for some time to ensure continuity in U.S. intelligence programs during the transition to a new administration. . . .

In an interview, Reyes said he believes that Director of National Intelligence Mike McConnell and CIA Director Michael Hayden should be kept in their posts. Reyes believes they should stay for at least six months, but said the time frame is ultimately a decision Obama must make....

Reyes, D-Texas, said he also recommended to Obama's transition team that some parts of the CIA's controversial alternative interrogation program should be allowed to continue. He declined to say what he specifically recommended, however. . . .

"There are those that believe that this particular issue has to be dealt with very carefully because there are beliefs that there are some options that need to be available," Reyes said.

So far there is very little to seem positive about when it comes to fundamentally changing U.S. torture policy. All the trial balloons are floating in the wrong direction, and things are being set up to turn to the supposedly moderate Army Field Manual as the "reasonable" substitute, the "best we can do." Except it includes techniques that are right out of Guantanamo, and constitute violations of international law, if not the U.S. War Crimes Act. The Pentagon, the DIA, the CIA, I don't know... someone is gaming the system on this, and no doubt hope the populace is so afraid about the crumbling economy that hardly anyone will notice.

PHR has long taken the front-line position in exposing the corrupted parts of the AFM, but once a meme gets established, it's difficult to change it. Other human rights and civil liberties groups are going to have to step up and put the pressure on. The military and intelligence agencies are twisting arms in D.C. If we don't fight back, and show public interest, then things will not change.

Hat-tips to jhutson and truong son traveler of Daily Kos

Human Rights First "End Torture Now" Letter Campaign to Obama

Human Rights First has set up a short, effective and simple way for you to register your opposition to U.S. torture. Click here and you will be taken to an automated webpage that allows you to write your own letter and send it to President-elect Obama. It just takes a few minutes. Why not do it now?

We Can End Torture Now

On the occasion of the 60th Anniversary of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, we ask that you contact President-elect Obama's Transition Team.

Let them know that restoring America's place in the world as a nation that stands up for human rights must be a top priority, and that the new administration should act swiftly to fix U.S. interrogation and detention policies.

No torture. No exceptions.

"You're on Earth -- There's no cure for that!"

Scene from Endgame by Samuel Beckett - Rick Cluchey as Hamm

Hamm: Me to play.
(He takes out his handkerchief, unfolds it, holds it spread out before him.)
We're getting on.
(Pause.)
You weep, and weep, for nothing, so as not to laugh, and little by little... you begin to grieve.
(He folds the handkerchief, puts it back in his pocket, raises his head.)
All those I might have helped.
(Pause.)
Helped!
(Pause.)
Saved.
(Pause.)
Saved!
(Pause.)
The place was crawling with them.
(Pause. Violently.)
Use your head, can't you, use your head, you're on earth, there's no cure for that!
(Pause.)
Get out of here and love one another! Lick your neighbor as yourself!
(Pause. Calmer.)
When it wasn't bread they wanted it was crumpets.
(Pause. Violently.)
Out of my sight and back to your petting parties!
(Pause.)
All that, all that!
(Pause.)
Not even a real dog!
(Calmer.)
The end is in the beginning and yet you go on.

NSA Calls for FOIA Reform; CIA Blocks Crucial JFK Docs

Jefferson Morley has an article up at the Washington Monthly asking readers to support the National Security Archive's call for President-elect Barack Obama to "issue a new executive order on FOIA creating a presumption of disclosure and a policy of releasing information without litigation." Sixty organizations have already signed NSA's request, including People for the American Way, Federation of American Scientists, Electronic Frontier Foundation, and the Association of American Publishers.

Morley, a 15-year editor and staff writer at The Washington Post, and now National Editorial Director at the Center for Independent Media, has his own reasons for wanting access to records. He has been at the forefront of an effort to get the CIA to release records related to the assassination of John Kennedy. In particular, he and others want to see the "17 monthly reports that [George] Joannides was supposed to file about his secret operations in 1962-64," when he was "chief of the agency’s so-called 'psychological warfare' operations [which] aimed to bring about Castro’s overthrow."

The campaign to get the CIA to release the records, which according to the JFK Records Act should have been declassified, has been supported by both pro-conspiracy and pro-Warren Commission experts on the assassination, including Anthony Summers; Gerald Posner; Don DeLillo; the late Norman Mailer; Federal judge John Tunheim, who formerly chaired the Assassination Records Review Board; and former chief counsel of the House Select Committee on Assassinations, G. Robert Blakey.

According to an article by Morley at Salon.com a few years back:

According to declassified CIA records corroborated by interviews, Joannides secretly financed exiled Cuban agents who collected intelligence on Lee Harvey Oswald three months before Kennedy was killed. Fifteen years later, Joannides was called out of retirement by the CIA to serve as the agency's liaison to the House committee looking into Kennedy's assassination. While working with the committee, the spy withheld information about his own actions in 1963 from the congressional investigators he was supposed to be assisting. It wasn't until 2001, 38 years after Kennedy's death, that Joannides' support for the Cuban exiles, who clashed with Oswald and monitored him, came to light.

"[Joannides'] behavior was criminal," said Blakey, the former House committee counsel who was deceived by the CIA agent. "He obstructed our investigation."

"The agency is stonewalling," said Posner, whose bestselling book supported the Warren Commission's finding that Oswald, alone and unaided, killed Kennedy. "It's a perfect example of why the public has so little trust in the CIA's willingness to be truthful."

Joannides died in 1990, nine years after receiving the CIA’s Career Intelligence Medal for "exceptional achievement." His story is little known, and neither is the suit against the CIA for the records. Meanwhile, it's been a year since an appellate court demanded the CIA explain why it has not produced the records requested. The CIA has responded with arrogant silence. Another ruling on the case is at least a year away.

For many years, any informed speculation or research into the causes and facts behind the assassination of President John F. Kennedy has been relegated to the dustbin of tomfoolery and tinfoil, considered the hobby-horse of conspiracy addicts and general paranoid nut-cases. This unfortunate situation has been furthered by both the population of narcissists and publicity-seekers who irresponsibly spread rumors and legend on the JFK assassination, and by the secrecy that still surrounds important elements of the case. The secrecy serves to undermine serious attempts to get to the truth. This is why Morley's suit against the CIA has been supported by all sides in the assassination "industry."

Anyone who has been knee-jerk resistant to any serious discussion of the JFK assassination has not been following the serious research being done on the case in the last fifteen years or so. One example is the work of a long-time Army intellgence officer and former executive assistant to the director of the National Security Agency (NSA -- yeah, that other NSA), John M. Newman, who wrote Oswald and the CIA, documenting Lee Harvey Oswald's ties to the intelligence community.

Most recently, Morley's book, Our Man in Mexico: Winston Scott and the Hidden History of the CIA, received favorable coverage at the well-known conspiracy rag, Harper's. From the Amazon product description:

Morley reveals the previously unknown scope of the agency's interest in Oswald in late 1963, identifying for the first time the code names of Scott's surveillance programs that monitored Oswald's movements. He shows that CIA headquarters cut Scott out of the loop of the agency's latest reporting on Oswald before Kennedy was killed. He documents why Scott came to reject a key finding of the Warren Report on the assassination and how his disillusionment with the agency came to worry his longtime friend James Jesus Angleton, legendary chief of CIA counterintelligence. Angleton not only covered up the agency's interest in Oswald but also, after Scott died, absconded with the only copies of his unpublished memoir.

The JFK assassination may never be "solved" -- indeed, Morley isn't seeking to solve it, he says -- but the truth about the involvement of the CIA, which was covered up at the time, and still to this day, speaks volumes about the real influence of the CIA in our country's affairs, and the price we pay when any governmental agency is able to run a rogue operation, unaccountable to any governmental agency.

In 1976, the New York Times wrote the following on its front page (no link -- I had to purchase the article -- 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.

The year was 1976. The 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!)

Please support the National Security Archive's call for President-elect Obama to make transparency and openness in government a top priority. From their action page:

The Obama administration can act quickly after taking office in January to reverse the secrecy trend of the last eight years and restore openness in the executive branch, according to a set of new proposals posted online... by the National Security Archive. More than 60 organizations joined the recommendations, which call on President-elect Obama to restore efficiency and openness to the Freedom of Information Act process, reform the classification system to reduce overclassification and facilitate greater declassification, and ensure that presidential records are handled in accordance with the law and Congress’ intent.

Also posted at Progressive Historians

APA Presidential Election's Dismal Results

The results of the presidential election in the American Psychological Association were reported yesterday. The election had been closely watched by many, due to the candidacy of psychologist Steven Reisner, who had run on an explicitly reform platform, opposing previous APA policy on interrogations, and callling for full transparency in dealings of APA figures with governmental agencies.

Unfortunately, Dr. Reisner came in third. Carol Goodheart won the election, as tabulated by Intelliscan, Inc. via mail and internet ballot. She will be the 2009 President-elect.

As can be expected, Reisner supporters were dismayed. A few wondered how the results could have been so small for Reisner after the great turnout and vote for the anti-torture referendum he supported last September. For better or worse, without any evidence of fraud, the results will have to stand as is. It seems to me that the bulk of the APA membership -- at least those who voted -- were not ready to make a fundamental change in leadership, and/or listened too closely to the scare tactics generated by the APA bureaucracy during the election.

The implementation of the anti-torture referendum now lies in the hands of the conservative APA Council of Representatives, who meet next February and will consider concrete steps to take around the member-initiated new policy. The election of Goodheart does not bode well for the pro-referendum supporters. Goodheart is on record as against the kind of policy change re interrogations that the referendum was meant to implement.

The following excerpt concerning Dr. Goodheart is from an article I wrote about the election last April:

Goodheart is, as Steven Reisner once labeled her, an "APA stalwart." A psychotherapist in private practice, and a clinical supervisor in the psychology training program at Rutgers, she has served on the APA Board of Directors, and most recently was APA Treasurer. Currenly, she's working with APA President-elect Bray on his 2009 Presidential Task Force on the Future of Psychology Practice. Is part of that future staffing the BSCTs for the military at Guantánamo and elsewhere?

When psychologists mobilizing to withhold their dues from APA in protest against APA's interrogation policy queried Dr. Goodheart about her position, she replied:

I know that some psychologists in good conscience and good faith want APA also to prohibit psychologists from any participation whatsoever in military interrogations. There is serious debate within APA about the appropriate role for psychologists and I do not know if we will ever be able to reach total agreement. I, along with the majority of the Council of Representatives, voted against a moratorium, after listening carefully and considering all views seriously. As my own act of personal conscience, in the hope that we will be able to influence policy and practices related to interrogations, I believe that we must support psychology's promotion of ethical interrogations to prevent violence, safeguard detainees' welfare, and facilitate communications with them. We must stay engaged and work with the people, both military and non-military, who are working with great dedication to prevent torture and other forms of cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment and punishment.

In other words, as one prominent member of APAs Division of Psychoanalysis put it:

She feels that to exclude psychologists from morally problematic places may leave prisoners even more vulnerable, and she argues that defining psychologists' presence as unethical would jeopardize ethical professionals who have been in this situation.

This makes Goodheart's stance on psychologists and interrogation a mirror image of APA's official position: psychologists make interrogations safer for detainees. Yet overwhelming evidence implicates psychologists in both the construction and implementation of a torture paradigm that emphasizes sensory deprivation and overstimulation, sleep deprivation, inculcation of debility, psychological regression, and dependency.

The following is the official tally of votes:

Carol D. Goodheart, EdD....... 13,898 votes
Ronald H. Rozensky, PhD....... 7,755 votes
Steven J. Reisner, PhD........... 4,674 votes
Robert E. McGrath, PhD........ 2,552 votes
Jack Kitaeff, PhD, JD............. 1,767 votes

No matter what the results, both psychologists and non-psychologists owe Steven Reisner a debt of gratitude for the courageous race he ran, standing up publicly against militarism and abusive state policy. I know he took a lot of heat for it. He may have lost the race, but he certainly showed he was a winner.

Whence Torture? An Early SERE Critic, Circa 1956

Joost Meerloo was a Dutch psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who, having fled German-occupied Holland in 1942, and survived torture by the Gestapo in Belgium, made a name for himself in British and U.S. medical establishments. By the early 1950s, he had undertaken an examination of the supposedly new phenomena of "brainwashing." The latter had made headlines when U.S. POWs in the Korean War cooperated with their captors, and even made accusations of U.S. use of "germ warfare." Dr. Meerloo was expert witness on "menticide" -- his term for brainwashing -- at the U.S. tribunal of Frank Schwable, one of the men involved in biological weapons accusations.

All this is by way of background, and while interesting in and of itself, I've written some on this before. While today we know that the primary providers of domestic propaganda on brainwashing were sponsored by or agents of the CIA -- Frank Hunter, who coined the term, was only revealed to be in the pay of the CIA years later -- I don't know how closely Dr. Meerloo was involved with U.S. intelligence. His contacts, his works, and his interests seem to argue that he was heavily involved.

With my interests in the literature of the period (see link), when the works of psychologists and physicians heavily concentrated upon how to induce suggestion and control of a person's mind, it was only a matter of time until I found myself reading Meerloo's out-of-print 1956 classic, The Rape of the Mind: The Psychology of Thought Control, Menticide, and Brainwashing. (A portion of the work, though not the quote below, can be read online.)

So imagine my surprise when Dr. Meerloo had some comments to make about an organization that has been heavily implicated in the U.S. military's torture regime abroad. The Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (or SERE) schools in the different branches of the military have their origin in the Pentagon's response to the POW confessions of the Korean War. More recently, it has been documented that psychologists working for SERE, in probably collusion with military and political higher-ups, helped the CIA and military "reverse-engineer" the torture techniques the school was supposed to use to inoculate U.S. military personnel against foreign coercive interrogation and captivity. Subsequently, these techniques were used against detainees in Bush's "war on terror", from Guantanamo, to Iraq, to Afghanistan, and possibly at secret CIA "black prisons" around the world.

On page 262-263 of the 1961 Universal Library edition of Rape of the Mind is the following criticism of the SERE program. How odd that it comes from one of the principal investigators into interrogations of his time, one closely associated with the CIA/military program of the 1950s that was investigating how to psychologically break down prisoners in a "scientific" fashion, and which included such sinister programs as MK-ULTRA and MK-NAOMI. The quote comes from Chapter 15, "Training Against Mental Torture." The words are prescient in the extreme. (Bold emphasis is added.)

An educational concept exists to the effect that conditioning to physical torture will help soldiers to be more immune to brainwashing. In one of the air force bases, airmen had to go through a "school of torture," euphemistically called the School of Survival, in which some of the barbarous and cruel Communist methods of handling prisoners were initiated in order to harden the men against future brutality. [Meerloo here footnotes an article on the school in Time, Sept. 19, 1955, "Training in Torture", which can be read online.] The trainees could stand the ghoulish exercises rather well. However, such a training can condition men to take over, unwittingly, the methods of totalitarianism. It may give a semiofficial green light to enemy tactics by implying that we can do the same. Moreover, such methods may stimulate hidden sadistic tendencies in both trainer and trainee. Under the disguise of an earnest training need, American youth may be educated in the same sadistic view as their enemies

Meerloo could have added that, after decades, an entire bureaucratic apparatus or section of government can become infected with the bacillus of brutality and sadism. This is one way that one can understand how it was that the SERE officials -- although not all of them -- were so excited about contributing their expertise when asked by the Department of Defense in late 2001.

As the drumbeat for investigations and prosecutions of Bush officialdom gains intensity in the last days of Bush's rule, and particularly over the promotion of torture, it will help us to understand the motivation of the men who acted to spread this vile practice, to understand why they were so easily perverted, the better to make sure it will never happen again. Because recent events have proven that we have become, as medical ethicist and researcher Steven Miles titled it, a torture-endangered society, "a society that is abraded by the process of dehumanization."

One place any policy committee could start is with the decommissioning of the SERE schools. There is no evidence they do what they say they do. They are unnecessarily brutal to soldiers, and now we know, they are breeding grounds for savagery and a drive to torture among their practitioners.

More Government Fear-mongering: "The World at Risk"

The world has been at risk since the reckless U.S. rulers decided to unleash the atomic bomb on tens of thousands of civilians in Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Since then, they have built the most mighty arsenal of destruction as the world has ever seen. But then, this short essay is about the Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism.

As the BBC reported:

The bi-partisan Commission on the Prevention of WMD Proliferation and Terrorism was set up after the attacks of 11 September 2001.

Its report is due to be presented to Vice-President-elect Joe Biden on Wednesday, but its contents have already been widely reported in the US media.

It says terrorists are "likely" to stage a nuclear or biological weapons attack somewhere in the world in the next five years.

Without urgent action, "it is more likely than not that a weapon of mass destruction will be used in a terrorist attack somewhere in the world by the end of 2013," the commission says.

The sharp analysts at Moon of Alabama noticed that the cracker-jack folks who put together the report, to be delivered today to Jack Bauer of CTC Vice-President-elect Joe Biden, forgot to provide corroborating evidence for their claims about near-term terrorist attack.

The 132 pages include not one paragraph or line which makes a calculation, quantitative or qualitative, that would allow one to come to the conclusion that the executive summary asserts....

It makes for scaremongering headlines as the media, like usual, do not care to really look into these issues.

Good headlines... and paperback book sales! Vintage Books, a division of Random House, has announced an "instant" book will be published of the report. At $10.95, it will only be, uh, $10.95 more than the free version published online.

Better reading than the report are the commissioner and staff biographies of those who worked on this document. They are almost all drawn from the orbit of the defense and intelligence industries. A fair number have personal or organizational ties to the GOP, Paul Wolfowitz, and right-wing think tanks. Here's a sampling:

Chair: Republican Senator Bob Graham, a 10-year member of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence

Vice Chair: Republican Senator Jim Talent, an eight-year member of the House Armed Services Committee, and currently "a Distinguished Fellow at the Washington, DC, based Heritage Foundation where he specializes in military readiness issues and welfare reform"

The other commissioners include Robin Cleveland, "a former close advisor to Paul Wolfowitz," and caught up in the Wolfowitz World Bank Scandal; Henry Sokolski, who "worked on nonproliferation issues under Secretary of Defense Paul Wolfowitz"; former GWB assistant secretary of state Stephen G. Rademaker, and also "Policy Director for National Security Affairs and Senior Counsel for Sen. Bill Frist".

Of course, there are some Democratic Party types, drawn from its Clinton-centrist wing, like Ambassador Wendy Sherman, and former Congressman Tim Roemer, a former member of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, and now president of the Center for National Policy.

The work of these commissions is really done, as everyone knows, by staff, and it is worth perusing who some of these staff members were (not inclusive):

Evelyn Farkas, Ph. D, Executive Director
Former Professional Staff Member of the Senate Armed Services Committee, and Associate Professor of International Relations at the U.S. Marine Corps Command and Staff College, Marine Corps University.

Eric Fanning, Deputy Director
Former Senior Vice President for Strategic Development at Business Executives for National Security, and special assistant in the Office of the Secretary of Defense.

Raj De, General Counsel
Partner in the Washington, D.C. office of the international law firm Mayer Brown LLP. Former Counsel to the Special Bi-Partisan Staff of the Senate Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs Committee and to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks upon the United States (the “9/11 Commission”)....

Stephen Heil, Professional Staff Member
Senior Intelligence Officer for the Counterproliferation Support Office at the Defense Intelligence Agency.

Joseph Helman, Ph.D., Director for Intelligence
Member of the Senior National Intelligence Service in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Adam Jones, Professional Staff Member
Former Chief Speechwriter in the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Abraham Kanter, Staff Assistant
Former research consultant for Department of Defense-funded analysis research institute. Served with the Transnational Threats Project at the Center for Strategic and International Studies.

Neal A. Pollard, Director for Counterterrorism
Former Dynamic Planning Branch Chief and Deputy Group Chief, Global Engagement, National Counterterrorism Center. Adjunct Professor of Microbiology, and former International Affairs Fellow of the Council on Foreign Relations. Co-founder and former Board Director, Terrorism Research Center....

William Reed, Professional Staff Member
Analyst and Presidential Management Fellow in the Department of Homeland Security Office of Program Analysis and Evaluation. Former submarine officer in the U.S. Navy.

Constance T. Rybka, Chief of Security
Detailed from the Intelligence Community. Former senior chemical and biological warfare analyst. Retired U.S. Army Officer.

Wade R. Sharp, Security Officer
Associate with Booz Allen Hamilton, providing security support services to the Office of Security & Counterintelligence within the Office of the Director of National Intelligence.

Gathered from the intelligence and security/defense worlds, populated by right wing Republicans and centrist and right-wing Democrats, the outcome of the commission's "report" was foreordained. To have expected anything different or unbiased from this crew -- whose paychecks depend on the perpetuity of the "war on terror" and fear-mongering -- would be akin to an expectation that the foxes would vote themselves out of the hen-house.

The timing of the publication of this report, set as December 2008 some time ago, was meant to both escape influencing the presidential election, but also to orient the incoming president, whoever that was to be, about what his or her marching orders were to be when it came to financing and staffing the myriad departments, offices, and committees whose existence depends on keeping the mighty U.S. war and intelligence industries chugging along.

A major section of the report describes the problem of nuclear proliferation. No major change in policy is noted, as the report argues for greater cooperation with Russia on the issue. It also argues that Iran and North Korea nuclear weapons programs, whatever they may be, constitute a serious danger and must be stopped. (When it comes to terrorism, Pakistan is marked as the most dangerous state.)

If you want a short-hand version of how the U.S. elites see the world, this is an interesting report. If you want to know about how the world really is, and who or what constitutes a threat, then don't read this fairy tale. You'll find nothing in it about threats of NATO expansionism even further into the former Soviet Union, about placing forward missiles in Poland, or advanced radar systems in the Czech Republic. You'll read nary a word about the largest stock of nuclear weapons in the world, and held by a country, furthermore, that has shown a readiness to use them.

But you can read about it here:

The United States has produced about 70,000 nuclear weapons of 72 major types since their invention. At the end of the Cold War in 1991 the United States had an active arsenal of some 23,000 weapons of 26 major types. Since that time actual nuclear warhead production has been completely shut down in the U.S., although warhead modification, retrofit, and maintenance activities continue. Much of the original nuclear weapons manufacturing infrastructure has been dismantled, and the focus of the remaining nuclear infrastructure has shifted to maintaining and extending the life of the remaining weapons, as well as dismantling surplus weapons.

The only strategic arms treaties still in force between the U.S. and the Russian Federation is the Moscow Treaty on Strategic Offensive Reductions (also called "the Moscow Treaty," the Strategic Offensive Reductions Treaty, or SORT) and the START I treaty, which will expire in December 2009....

Actual production of new warheads halted in 1989. In January 1997, the first new weapon modification since the production shutdown entered service - the B61 Mod 11 (B61-11) ground penetrating ("bunker busting") bomb. This was a modification of B61 Mod 7s that were already in the stockpile. Remanufacture and updating of subsystems of existing weapons is on-going as part of a stockpile Life-Extension Program (LEP).

Of course, the nuclear weapons programs of Russia, Great Britain, France, Israel, Pakistan and India -- and now North Korea -- remain dangers to the world, though the size of the U.S. arsenal and its newer "tactical" weaponry, like the bunker-buster nuclear device, remain among the most dangerous proliferation weapons in the world. The smaller states have nowhere near the number of weapons as the U.S. and Russia, but remain dangerous nonetheless.

It's U.S. policy to be supreme in warfare (masqueraded by the word "defense"), and that includes nuclear weapons. As long as the world political system is made up of competing nation-states, based on an exploitative system that ensures the perpetuation of mass poverty, and human nature remains what it is, the destruction of the world through nuclear war remains the number one threat to humanity, and much of life on earth. While only a whisper of a hope at this point, the idea that the world will forgo competition and take up a cooperative transnational socialist system with a planned economy, and the aim of enhancing the lives of all of earth's denizens, remains our only hope. But the elites will never simply forgo profits and the insanity of power. Ultimately it will have to be taken from them, and only a mass democratic socialist party will have the power and wherewithal to do that. And that still remains, as previously noted, a whisper of a hope, wrapped in a dream.

"The Greediest Fuckers Who Ever Lived"

Cheat Sheet for Eric Holder: Torture and Jus Cogens

News item today:

(Reuters) - President-elect Barack Obama on Monday named former deputy attorney general Eric Holder as his choice to be Attorney General, the top U.S. law enforcement official.

The following can be bookmarked by Holder and his new team. No thanks necessary; just use it.

The video is of testimony by Marjorie Cohn of the National Lawyers Guild before the Subcommittee on the Constitution, Civil Rights and Civil Liberties of the House Judiciary Committee in May, 2008. An adapted transcript can be read in full here.

The United States has always prohibited the use of torture in our Constitution, laws executive statements and judicial decisions. We have ratified three treaties that all outlaw torture and cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment. When the United States ratifies a treaty, it becomes part of the Supreme Law of the Land under the Supremacy Clause of the Constitution....

n Hamdan v. Rumsfeld, the Supreme Court rejected the Bush administration's argument that Common Article 3 doesn't cover the prisoners at Guantánamo. Justice Kennedy wrote that violations of Common Article 3 are war crimes.

We have federal laws that criminalize torture.

The War Crimes Act punishes any grave breach of the Geneva Conventions, as well as any violation of Common Article 3. That includes torture, willfully causing great suffering or serious injury to body or health, and inhuman, humiliating or degrading treatment.

The Torture Statute provides for life in prison, or even the death penalty if the victim dies, for anyone who commits, attempts, or conspires to commit torture outside the United States.

The U.S. Army Field Manual's provisions governing intelligence interrogations prohibit the "use of force, mental torture, threats, insults, or exposure to unpleasant and inhumane treatment of any kind." Brainwashing, mental torture, or any other form of mental coercion, including the use of drugs, are also prohibited. Military personnel who mistreat prisoners can be prosecuted by court-martial under provisions of the Uniform Code of Military Justice. These include conspiracy, cruelty and maltreatment, murder, manslaughter, maiming, sodomy, and assault.

In Filartiga v. Peña-Irala, the Second Circuit declared the prohibition against torture is universal, obligatory, specific and definable. Since then, every U.S. circuit court has reaffirmed that torture violates universal and customary international law. In the Paquete Habana, the Supreme Court held that customary international law is part of U.S. law.

Under Article 53 of the Vienna Convention, a jus cogens norm is:

"a norm accepted and recognized by the international community of States as a whole as a norm from which no derogation is permitted and which can be modified only by a subsequent norm of general international law having the same character."
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In Al-Adsani v. United Kingdom, the European Court of Human Rights ruled unamimously that "the prohibition of torture has achieved the status of a peremptory norm in international law," that is, a jus cogens. (See Al-Adsani v. United Kingdom (No.2) (35763/97) European Court of Human Rights 21 November 2001 para 61. -- Note, the ruling was disappointing in other ways, as not allowing that States were subject under this jus cogens re torture to civil prosecution. The vote was narrow, and few would consider the matter settled.)

There have been other serious international decisions made concerning enforcement of the jus cogens crimes, such as the war crimes committed during the Yugoslavian conflict of the early 1990s. An ad hoc tribunal was established by the United Nations in 1993, and set up at The Hague. Theodor Meron was a U.S. judge elected to the court who served from 2001 to 2007. The U.S. cannot argue it is against such a tribunal. NATO has, by its own account, "provided the finance to set up the Tribunal... are amongst the majority financiers."

The International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia stated in Prosecutor v. Furundžija that there is a jus cogens for the prohibition against torture.[10] It also stated that every State is entitled "to investigate, prosecute and punish or extradite individuals accused of torture, who are present in a territory under its jurisdiction."[11] Therefore, there is universal jurisdiction over torture. The rationale for this is that "the torturer has become, like the pirate and the slave trader before him, hostis humani generis, an enemy of all mankind."[12]

#10 Prosecutor v. Furundžija, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 2002, 121 International Law Reports 213 (2002)
#11 Prosecutor v. Furundžija, International Criminal Tribunal for the Former Yugoslavia, 2002, 121 International Law Reports 213 (2002)
#12 Janis, M. and Noyes, J. International Law": Cases and Commentary (3rd ed.), Prosecutor v. Furundžija, Page 148 (2006)
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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.

Use the above information wisely, Mr. Holder. The nation awaits justice. The world awaits justice. In the age of the Internet, there is no hiding from responsibility. You know what you have to do. Political expediency will be no excuse to forego the necessary prosecutions.

Addentum: A tardy H/T to Uncle $cam for the link to Ms. Cohn's video testimony!