Supreme Court Strangles Brown

The Brown in question here is Brown v. Board of Education, the landmark 1954 Supreme Court case that struck down legal segregation in U.S. schools. The decision also laid the basis for a series of other court cases (notably the second Brown case in 1955) and laws meant to advance social policy to reverse segregation and other discriminatory practices in society "with all deliberate speed".

Today, the Supreme Court by a 5-4 decision has ended the integration plans of two school districts in Louisville, Kentucky, and Seattle, Washington. In a separate opinion, SCOTUS Judge Kennedy left open the door for the use of racial criteria in some limited amount of cases. I'm not sure what the criteria for such is, but it didn't stop Kennedy from joining the conservative wing of the court in throwing out the integration plans of the above school disticts.

According to the New York Times account:

While [Chief Justice] Roberts said the court was being faithful to the Brown decision, Justice John Paul Stevens in a separate dissent called the chief justice's reliance on Brown to rule against integration "a cruel irony."

A demonstration of the twisted logic of the majority -- really a rehash of the old "reverse discrimination" argument of the 60s and 70s -- is demonstrated by this quote from the majority (brought to my attention in the excellent diary by The Maven over at Daily Kos):

Before Brown, schoolchildren were told where they could and could not go to school based on the color of their skin. The school districts in these cases have not carried the heavy burden of demonstrating that we should allow this once again—even for very different reasons. For schools that never segregated on the basis of race, such as Seattle, or that have removed the vestiges of past segregation, such as Jefferson County, the way "to achieve a system of determining admission to the public schools on a nonracial basis," Brown II, 349 U.S., at 300-301, is to stop assigning students on a racial basis. The way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race.

Justice Breyer replied to this travesty of justice and logical thinking in his dissenting opinion(again, thanks to The Maven):

Finally, what of the hope and promise of Brown? For much of this Nation's history, the races remained divided. It was not long ago that people of different races drank from separate fountains, rode on separate buses, and studied in separate schools. In this Court's finest hour, Brown v. Board of Education challenged this history and helped to change it. For Brown held out a promise. It was a promise embodied in three Amendments designed to make citizens of slaves. It was the promise of true racial equality--not as a matter of fine words on paper, but as a matter of everyday life in the Nation's cities and schools. It was about the nature of a democracy that must work for all Americans. It sought one law, one Nation, one people, not simply as a matter of legal principle but in terms of how we actually live....

The last half-century has witnessed great strides toward racial equality, but we have not yet realized the promise of Brown. To invalidate the plans under review is to threaten the promise of Brown. The plurality's position, I fear, would break that promise. This is a decision that the Court and the Nation will come to regret.

I must dissent.

Historically, Brown has been under attack by the conservative members of the Supreme Court. Clarence Thomas, in Missouri v. Jenkins (1995) espoused black separatist language, which really only amounts to separate but equal ideology:

...in the harm that it identified was tied purely to de jure segregation, not de facto segregation....

Given that desegregation has not produced the predicted leaps forward in black educational achievement, there is no reason to think that black students cannot learn as well when surrounded by members of their own race as when they are in an integrated environment.

Contrast that with Justice Warren's language from the original Brown case:

Today, education is perhaps the most important function of state and local governments. Compulsory school attendance laws and the great expenditures for education both demonstrate our recognition of the importance of education to our democratic society. It is required in the performance of our most basic public responsibilities, even service in the armed forces. It is the very foundation of good citizenship. Today it is a principal instrument in awakening the child to cultural values, in preparing him for later professional training, and in helping him to adjust normally to his environment. In these days, it is doubtful that any child may reasonably be expected to succeed in life if he is denied the opportunity of an education. Such an opportunity, where the state has undertaken to provide it, is a right which must be made available to all on equal terms.

The court opinions from today are available online at this link.

Torture Awareness Day

James Benjamin has a good series of links up at his blog, showing where to go to get more information on the history and use of torture. The reason: yesterday was Torture Awareness Day. (Okay, I'm a day late, but better late than never.)

Recently, the Torture Abolition and Survivor Support Coalition International (TASSC) has designated the month of June 2007 as Torture Awareness Month. Yesterday, Monday, June 26 was the U.N. International Day in Support of Torture Victims and Survivors.

The following is from the U.N. press release:

This year’s observance of the International Day in Support of Victims of Torture also marks the twenty-fifth anniversary of the United Nations Voluntary Fund for Victims of Torture, one of the largest humanitarian funds in the United Nations.

To mark the day, Louise Arbour, the United Nations High Commissioner for Human Rights, and Dr. Jose Quiroga, Medical Director, Programe for Torture Victims in Los Angeles, California, will hold a press conference at 1:30 p.m. on Monday, 26 June in Room III to launch the book Rebuilding Lives, which presents the experiences of torture survivors and the efforts of those who work to rehabilitate them.

Rebuilding Lives - available in English, French and Spanish - focuses on the work of the Fund and the efforts of the non-governmental organizations it has supported over the past twenty-five years to assist and rehabilitate victims of torture. The book includes five illustrated articles on current victim support projects in Australia, Bosnia and Herzegovina, Chile, Pakistan and Rwanda, contributed by both local and foreign journalists and photographers.

Excerpts from the book:

“Mustafa worked at the Coca-Cola plant on the outskirts of Sarajevo before the war broke out. He and his neighbours were held in a school, a garage, a sports hall and an army barracks. They were tortured, including through sexual abuse. They beat us with everything they had: rifles, metal bars and small sacks of bullets. Sometimes I feel the pain today in my legs and knees.” – Bosnia and Herzegovina

“Marie, now a 34-year–old mother of two, fell into the hands of the Interahamwe in western Rwanda. Each day, as the sun turns its back on Rwanda, Marie’s memories return…she is plagued by debilitating stomach pains and headaches. She still hears the drone of the transistor radio messages of the Hutu militia calling for violence. Over a period of three months, she was repeatedly raped by five contemptuous, brutal and insolent Interahamwe.” – Rwanda

“One night in 1996, while living in Kabul, Haider was dragged from his house by representatives of the Taliban and held prisoner on the grounds that he was Tajik and an alleged communist. After nearly two months of severe beatings and torture, he was taken to a hospital …Haider would walk on his toes, since it was too painful for him to place his soles on the floor. There was numbness in his calves, his muscles were weak and his kidneys were damaged.” – Pakistan

“I was tied up and blindfolded. When an official took the blindfold away…I saw Luis, my boyfriend. He and four other friends were hanging from a beam, with their arms wide open and their hands tied. They each looked like Christ, hanging on the cross. In front of them, the soldiers stripped me and they raped me.” – Chile

“One of the attractions of resettlement in Australia is that it is remote from the origins of the victims’ trauma. On the other hand, the distance means that they are separated from the support of family members and friends. Many victims consequently feel isolated and overwhelmed by the daunting task of rebuilding their lives.” – Australia

The book also examines the legal and medical definitions of torture, how and why it happens, the impact it has on victims, what makes torture different from other human rights violations, as well as ways in which it can be effectively treated and combated.

Please take time out today to educate yourself more about this abomination that remains part of human civilization. Donate to your favorite organization fighting torture, or show support for those individuals and blogs that are trying to publicize this struggle.

Torture Wars: Dispatch from the Front

So much is happening right now in the battle to stop U.S. torture that it is hard to get a handle on things. The Washington Post has an important new article out on how Cheney and his office have been pushing coercive interrogation policy since at least January 2002. Meanwhile, Mark Benjamin over at Salon.com has another important article on CIA and Pentagon collaboration on torture techniques at Guantanamo and elsewhere. This latter article touches upon the links between the military's SERE program and alleged use of psychologists in implementing torture and/or abusive interrogation techniques at U.S. military and secret CIA prisons abroad.

Meanwhile, one major battle front in the struggle to end torture centers around a proposition by an opposition within the American Psychological Association (APA) to enact a moratorium on psychologist participation in national security interrogations because of the abundant evidence accrued that shows torture and abusive interrogations in such settings, as well as the participation of military and/or CIA psychologists in the planning or implementation of such abuse.

A Sally by the Opposition: Issuance of an Open Letter

This campaign has heated up significantly since the declassification of an Army Inspector General report detailing instances of detainee abuse, and explaining some of the relations between the SERE program and Behavioral Consultant Consultation Teams (BSCTs) at Guantanamo prison, where hundreds of detainees are held in isolation and with no recourse to habeas corpus. These revelations led to the drafting of an Open Letter to the APA president by moratorium proponents, which has now been signed by around 500 psychologists. Physicians for Human Rights has similarly written to the APA. These organizations are asking for a change in APA policy, supporting the moratorium position and calling for investigations into past APA policies and commissions.

Every report of horrific abuses occurring at Guantánamo and elsewhere has not only cast doubt upon this basic premise of APA policy, these reports have repeatedly highlighted psychologists' abuse of psychological knowledge for purposes of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Yet the APA has never made any public attempt to investigate such reports....

It is time for the APA to acknowledge that the central premise of its years-long policy of condoning and encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations is Wrong....

It is critical that APA take immediate steps to remedy the damage done to the reputation of the organization, to our ethical standards, to the field of psychology, and to human rights in this age where they are under concerted attack.

As could be expected -- after all, we are talking about a major component of the U.S. state apparatus, meaning it's ability to control and interrogate, even torture, the prisoners it holds -- a backlash has taken shape over the campaign to stop psychologist participation in torture. Its vanguard are the military psychologists. Michael Gelles began this, with a letter he wrote defending APA policy and the general role of psychologists at interrogations, whose letter I both quote and deconstruct in an older posting on this blog.

A Military Psychologist Returns Fire

Now, Colonel Larry James, a member of an APA task force that last year came up with a recommendation that psychologists participate in the "war on terror" interrogations, has called foul for being named in the Open Letter referenced above.

I strongly object to, have never used, and will never use torture, cruel, or abusive treatment or punishment of any kind, for any reason, in any setting....

I do not use nor have I ever used ‘SERE’ techniques in any aspect of my work related to interrogations. Dr. Morgan Banks has emphasized repeatedly that in addition to being unethical, using a ‘SERE’ approach in an interrogation would be counterproductive to obtaining useful information. I strongly suspect that using a ‘SERE’ approach to an interrogation would yield data worthless for investigative and destructive for adjudicatory purposes.

What's very strange is that no one ever accused Colonel James, a psychologist who was the Chief Psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantanamo, Cuba in 2003, and Director of the Behavioral Science Unit, Joint Interrogation and Debriefing Center at Abu Ghraib prison in 2004, of ever using any torture or cruel and unusual and abusive treatment or punishment himself.

As the authors of the Open Letter wrote in reply to Col. James's strenuous protest:

To be clear, the Open Letter simply reproduces information that has long been on the public record. Principally, we drew upon the Pentagon’s Office of Inspector General [OIG] revelations that BSCT psychologists were involved in SERE-based interrogation methods at Guantánamo, and on other government documents, that Colonel James, reporting to Major General Geoffrey Miller, had command responsibility for the BSCTs during the period documented in the OIG’s report (Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse).

These facts, which Colonel James did not refute in his letter, raise serious and valid questions about the role of psychology and psychologists in abusive interrogations.... It would indeed be irresponsible for those of us in the APA to leave these and many other questions unanswered. As the open letter acknowledges, we do not know precisely what role(s) Colonel James or other military/intelligence psychologists played in the abusive interrogation regime documented by numerous sources over the past half decade, and which, we cannot emphasize enough, have now been definitively confirmed by the Department of Defense’s own Inspector General based on years of internal Pentagon investigations.

Military Defenders Circle the Wagons

Despite such clear words and intentions, allies of Col. James and other military psychologists within APA have taken up the cudgels for their embattled brethren. An ex-APA president has taken the Open Letter authors to task, as more likely all associated with the battle against pro-interrogation forces, for not following internal APA procedures for confronting unethical members and then filing charges with appropriate APA bodies. This ex-president -- and I will not give his name, nor quote directly from his email, for reasons soon to be obvious -- is critical of those who make charges on the Internet and private listservs, and reminds his opponents that legal charges could be brought against them for making defamatory remarks about individuals.

Except... no defamatory remarks have been made!

But this offensive by an APA bigwig is not the only evidence of backlash. Leaders of APA's Division 45, the Society for the Psychological Study of Ethnic Minority Issues, has run to James's defense, deriding criticisms of their colleague, and assuring their readers that APAs policies are actually making things safer and less abusive in the world of military interrogations. I guess Division 45 leadership never read the AP article last March reporting the International Red Cross's conclusion as of at least late 2006, Guantanamo detainees were still being held "under highly abusive conditions".

What is one to make of all this?

Stop Torture Interrogations Now!

There are other matters pressing upon the overall situation outlined above. Not least was the recent White House tease about closing Guantanamo outright, which was was gone over with a fine-tooth comb over at Unbossed. Then you could add in the prospect of Senate hearings on the SERE-psychologist-Guantanamo torture links, and the revelation that the CIA is about to declassify its "crown jewels" -- years of documents on dirty tricks, illegal activities, and the like -- and you have a veritable political tsunami threatening to sweep away the political landscape as we know it.

Will this mean movement at last on impeachment hearings for Cheney, Gonzales, and Bush? Will this mean organizations like the APA are about to see decades-long modus operandi shattered by constituent upheaval? One thing is for sure: the use of torture by a supposedly free society has acted like an acid on all political institutions and relationships. The battle has been engaged, and in war it's always difficult to foresee the outcome.

By the way, if you are a psychologist and reading this, don't forget to go over to this website to read the complete text of the Open Letter to the APA President and to become an official signatory of this important document.

Washington Post: CIA to Release Long Classified Records

The Washington Post has a major article on CIA abuse over the past 60 years, following the news that the CIA plans to release hundreds of documents next week. These documents apparently will fill in many gaps in our knowledge of CIA surveillance of U.S. protest groups, on CIA use of drug experimentation on unwitting victims, on break-ins, wiretapping, theft, and monitoring of journalists, congressmen, and much more. The story is written by Karen DeYoung and Walter Pincus.

A small preview:

The documents, to be publicly released next week, also include accounts of break-ins and theft, the agency's opening of private mail to and from China and the Soviet Union, wiretaps and surveillance of journalists, and a series of "unwitting" tests on U.S. civilians, including the use of drugs....

In anticipation of the CIA's release, the National Security Archive at George Washington University yesterday published a separate set of documents from January 1975 detailing internal government deliberations of the abuses. Those documents portray a rising sense of panic within the administration of President Gerald R. Ford that what then-CIA Director William E. Colby called "skeletons" in the CIA's closet had begun to be revealed in news accounts.

Kissinger warned that if other operations were divulged, "blood will flow. For example, Robert Kennedy personally managed the operation on the assassination of [Cuban President Fidel] Castro"....

Worried that the disclosures could lead to criminal prosecutions, Kissinger added that "when the FBI has a hunting license into the CIA, this could end up worse for the country than Watergate," the scandal that led to the fall of the Nixon administration the previous year.

This should be a very interesting upcoming week. Meanwhile, AP is reporting that the U.S. is seriously considering closing down the Guantanamo gulag. Here's a link to that story, but it's from Yahoo News and those links seem to disappear after awhile. Sorry, only source I have right now.

To make up for it, here's a link to the National Security Archive, a wonderful site, who will be apparently hosting many of these released documents. They also have already the document where Kissinger warns Ford noted above. And this link goes to a PDF of the 6 page summary that supposedly reveals the CIA's top "skeltons", as of the mid-1970s. (God knows there are many new skeletons being born in the creepy basement rooms of 21st century Foggy Bottom.)

Psychologists: Sign the Open Letter to APA President Brehm -- Change Course on APA Interrogation Policy Now!

An open letter signed by a number of American Psychological Association (APA) psychologists has been posted online, and interested psychologists can click on the link at the beginning of this paragraph to add their name to the over 200 psychologists who have already endorsed this important statement. There's also a place to leave your own comment!

What follows is a truncated version of the letter. Psychologists, please go to the site to read the entire thing, and sign the letter (I believe the creators of the letter are only looking for psychologists, as the aim is to pressure the APA leadership from their own constituency).

Dear President Brehm:

We write you as psychologists concerned about the participation of our profession in abusive interrogations of national security detainees at Guantánamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, and at the so-called CIA "black sites."

Our profession is founded on the fundamental ethical principle, enshrined as Principle A in our Ethical Principles of Psychologists and Code of Conduct: "Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm." Irrefutable evidence now shows that psychologists participating in national security interrogations have systematically violated this principle. A recently declassified August 2006 report by the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) –Review of DoD-Directed Investigations of Detainee Abuse-describes in detail how psychologists from the military's Survival, Evasion Resistance, and Escape (SERE) program were instructed to apply their expertise in abusive interrogation techniques to interrogations being conducted by the DoD throughout all three theaters of the War on Terror (Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq)....

The OIG report details a number of trainings and consultations provided by SERE psychologists to psychologists and other personnel involved in interrogations, including those on the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT), generally composed of and headed by psychologists. The OIG confirms repeated press accounts over the last two years that SERE techniques were "reverse engineered" by SERE psychologists in consultation with the BSCT psychologists and others, to develop and standardize a regime of psychological torture used by interrogators at Guantánamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan....

While other health professional associations expressed dismay when it was reported that their members had participated in these abuses and took principled stands against their members' direct participation in interrogations, the APA undertook a campaign to support such involvement. In 2005, APA President Ron Levant created the PENS Task Force to assess the ethics of such participation. Six of the nine voting psychologist members selected for the task force were uniformed and civilian personnel from military and intelligence agencies, most with direct connections to national security interrogations. Perhaps most problematic, it is clear from the OIG Report that three of the PENS members were directly in the chain of command translating SERE techniques into harsh interrogation tactics. Although we cannot know exactly what each of these individuals did, their presence in the chain of command is troubling....

Not surprisingly, given its membership, the PENS Task Force report concluded that "[i]t is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation and information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes...." The Task Force report further echoed the Department of Defense cover story for employing BSCT psychologists: "While engaging in such consultative and advisory roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations, doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants."

Since the release of the PENS report, numerous articles in the press have documented that psychologists at Guantánamo and elsewhere have utilized abusive SERE techniques on detainees....

Every report of horrific abuses occurring at Guantánamo and elsewhere has not only cast doubt upon this basic premise of APA policy, these reports have repeatedly highlighted psychologists' abuse of psychological knowledge for purposes of cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment. Yet the APA has never made any public attempt to investigate such reports.

It is time for the APA to acknowledge that the central premise of its years-long policy of condoning and encouraging psychologist participation in interrogations is wrong....The following steps will begin the process of correcting this egregious error by the organization and its leadership. We urgently recommend that:

1. The President of the APA acknowledge errors and abuses and chart a new direction re-emphasizing human rights. In light of the recent revelations, you, as President of the APA, should issue a clear public statement that acknowledges the errors made by APA, in both policy and public statements, and abuses perpetrated by psychologists; you should call on the association to go in a new direction, giving primary emphasis to human rights concerns in forging policy around ethics and national security.

2. The APA Board of Directors and Ethics Committee endorse the APA Moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations of foreign detainees. It is critical to immediately disengage psychologists from any direct or supervisory participation in interrogations of individual detainees. Such a step would do much to bring the APA in line with the positions adopted some time ago by the American Psychiatric Association, the American Medical Association, and the American Nurses Association. Thus, the APA leadership should support and the Council of Representatives must, at the August Convention, pass the Moratorium on Psychologist Involvement in Interrogations at US Detention Centers for Foreign Detainees proposed by Dr. Neil Altman and scheduled for a vote at Council.

3. The APA Board of Directors encourage, support, and cooperate with the Senate investigations of detainee treatment. It is essential that the APA support and cooperate fully with the announced investigation of the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC) into the role of SERE in the creation of abusive interrogation strategies, as well as the Senate Intelligence Committee's announced investigation into the CIA's handling of detainees in their custody. In fact, the APA Board of Directors should do what it can to expedite this and other external, non-partisan investigations of all localities that utilize BSCT psychologists.

4. The APA Board of Directors commence a neutral third-party investigation of its own involvement, and that of APA staff, in APA-military conflicts of interest. It is essential that the APA membership and the concerned public develop an in-depth understanding of how and why the APA accepted a rationale for psychologist involvement in interrogations that has been revealed to have been advanced by involved psychologists, and which permitted their continued participation and supervision of abusive interrogation processes. The concept of "legal, ethical, safe, and effective" has been exposed as a euphemism for psychologist oversight of abuse; these activities can only be considered "ethical" because the APA Ethics Code (Standard 1.02) was rewritten in 2002 to define complying with any law or military regulation as "ethical"....

To fail to act now would be to continue an organizational policy that maintains and protects psychologists' roles as the architects of what can only be interpreted as a torture paradigm; one that has intentionally violated the Geneva Conventions, our nation's values, and our professional ethics.

Interested readers might also want to check out this fact sheet: Q&A: How the Pentagon’s Inspector General Report Contradicts What the APA Has Said About the Involvement of Psychologists in Abusive Interrogations

"American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial"

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gave a very interesting commencement speech at Stanford University last weekend. I think it is worth reading, and I've excerpted the sections that I think were most pointed below:

Everything now is entertainment. And the purpose of this omnipresent commercial entertainment is to sell us something. American culture has mostly become one vast infomercial.

I have a reccurring nightmare. I am in Rome visiting the Sistine Chapel. I look up at Michelangelo's incomparable fresco of the "Creation of Man." I see God stretching out his arm to touch the reclining Adam's finger. And then I notice in the other hand Adam is holding a Diet Pepsi.

When was the last time you have seen a featured guest on David Letterman or Jay Leno who isn't trying to sell you something? A new movie, a new TV show, a new book, or a new vote?

Don't get me wrong. I love entertainment, and I love the free market. I have a Stanford MBA and spent 15 years in the food industry. I adore my big-screen TV. The productivity and efficiency of the free market is beyond dispute. It has created a society of unprecedented prosperity.

But we must remember that the marketplace does only one thing—it puts a price on everything.

The role of culture, however, must go beyond economics. It is not focused on the price of things, but on their value. And, above all, culture should tell us what is beyond price, including what does not belong in the marketplace. A culture should also provide some cogent view of the good life beyond mass accumulation. In this respect, our culture is failing us....

Why do these issues matter to you? This is the culture you are about to enter. For the last few years you have had the privilege of being at one of the world's greatest universities—not only studying, but being a part of a community that takes arts and ideas seriously. Even if you spent most of your free time watching Grey's Anatomy, playing Guitar Hero, or Facebooking your friends, those important endeavors were balanced by courses and conversations about literature, politics, technology, and ideas.

Distinguished graduates, your support system is about to end. And you now face the choice of whether you want to be a passive consumer or an active citizen. Do you want to watch the world on a screen or live in it so meaningfully that you change it?

As reported in the San Francisco Chronicle, I'm not so sure the students got or were worthy of his message:

David Ollison, graduating with a degree in economics, plans to go on to law school. He said he is decidedly a "left-brain guy." While trying to keep a female blow-up doll named Francesca perched on his shoulders, he said that his primary interest is making money.

Besides, he laughed, "I'm a pop-culture whore."

A group of guys dressed in various animal outfits debated the issue of whether culture is bankrupt.

"You choose your own path in life," mused Zach Henick. "If you want to go into arts, go into arts. I'm pursuing economics."

His friend Jay Rubenstein, wearing camel ears, paused to proclaim, "Society sleeps in a bed of pigs." He added that the quote is his own.

"I think culture has to be what you make of it," he said. "For me, my culture is sports." He plans to work in energy trading and has a job lined up at Morgan Stanley.

Who would have thought that American triumphalism in the Cold War would lead to an insane, illegal war abroad and mindless idiocy at home? Who would have anticipated that we would have a national leadership that hates complexity, speaks neologisms, and simply honestly can't think. These aspects to U.S. society have been there all along, but now they are trumpeted with pride and anti-intellectual hubris. In the end, the pathetic farce of American society has its poets and artists begging the top tier of American academia not to be airheads and dopes. These days, who's smarter than a fifth grader anyway?

Insider Politics of the Torture Chamber

In a blockbuster article by Seymour Hersh over at The New Yorker, "The General's Report," two-star general Antonia Taguba describes how he came to write the first report investigating the abuse at Abu Ghraib prison. Taguba describes how he was shunned and ultimately forced to retire because he tried to be honest in his report. Most stories reporting on Hersh's article have not focused on the aspect that concerns how the CIA and military special operations forces both collaborated and contested over the issue of coercive interrogations. I want to look more in depth at that.

A Washington Post article summarized well Taguba's charges:

In interviews with New Yorker reporter Seymour M. Hersh, Taguba said that he was ordered to limit his investigation to low-ranking soldiers who were photographed with the detainees and the soldiers' unit, but that it was always his sense that the abuse was ordered at higher levels. Taguba was quoted as saying that he thinks top commanders in Iraq had extensive knowledge of the aggressive interrogation techniques that mirrored those used on high-value detainees at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and that the military police "were literally being exploited by the military interrogators."

Reading Hersh's article myself, I was struck by the opaque quality that characterized the interactions between military intelligence, the Pentagon command structure and the CIA. We have some sense of how part of this worked by reading the recent Office of Inspector General report on detainee abuse, which describes how Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) military personnel, including psychologists, were used in training Guantánamo interrogators in coercive techniques.

What Hersh's article adds is a sense of how CIA personnel and higher-ups viewed the usurption of "higher-level" prisoners for interrogation by "special operations units", including possibly -- though Taguba doesn't say this -- by contractors. (The latter is a huge and controversial aspect of the Abu Ghraib story, and was addressed in the original Taguba report. For more information on this, please reference an excellent UK Guardian story from 2004.)

White House preempts civilian/military chain of command

According to Hersh, the CIA, even while "cooperating" with military special ops, were critical. They may (or may not) have had differences with the SERE-type torture being implemented, but CIA wanted some legal reassurances "before aggressively interrogating high-value targets". The CIA operates under presidential mandate, and is used to getting formal findings to legitmate their actions, with such findings communicated officially to the senior leadership of the House and the Senate Intelligence Committees. But this wasn't happening, because the White House refused to follow legal protocol and issue the findings, at least for awhile. When they finally did, a number of countries were said to become "free-fire zones" for the CIA. The Company was also given carte blanche to conduct its secret prison program.

I wish Hersh would have expanded this portion of his article, because it's unclear what finally happened with the CIA, who now awaits a new set of findings from the President on how to conduct interrogations. Evidently, Hersh couldn't get the full story here, or the evidence was contradictory. You'll see this as you read the article.

To get a flavor of what Taguba was up against, as he encountered the web of interrogator politics at Abu Ghraib, consider the case of Lieutenant Colonel Steven L. Jordan, whom assorted MPs had mentioned as involved with the detainees. Jordan is also the only officer to be charged in the Abu Ghraib scandal, adn is to go on trial this summer.

From Hersh's article:

For the first three weeks of the investigation, Jordan was nowhere to be found, despite repeated requests. When the investigators finally located him, he asked whether he needed to shave his beard before being interviewed—Taguba suspected that he had been dressing as a civilian. “When I asked him about his assignment, he says, ‘I’m a liaison officer for intelligence from Army headquarters in Iraq.’” But in the course of three or four interviews with Jordan, Taguba said, he began to suspect that the lieutenant colonel had been more intimately involved in the interrogation process -- some of it brutal -- for “high value” detainees....

Taguba said that Jordan’s “record reflected an extensive intelligence background.” He also had reason to believe that Jordan was not reporting through the chain of command. (emphasis mine)

This begs the question: who was Jordan reporting to? Hersh has been telling us for some time that to understand what's happened since 9/11 and in Iraq that we should look to the chain of command. His book on Abu Ghraib is called Chain of Command. At the top of the command structure is the President, as the latter is so fond of telling us. Hersh has some choice words about President Bush:

Whether the President was told about Abu Ghraib in January (when e-mails informed the Pentagon of the seriousness of the abuses and of the existence of photographs) or in March (when Taguba filed his report), Bush made no known effort to forcefully address the treatment of prisoners before the scandal became public, or to reëvaluate the training of military police and interrogators, or the practices of the task forces that he had authorized. Instead, Bush acquiesced in the prosecution of a few lower-level soldiers. The President’s failure to act decisively resonated through the military chain of command....

Taguba went on, “There was no doubt in my mind that this stuff” -- the explicit images -- “was gravitating upward. It was standard operating procedure to assume that this had to go higher. The President had to be aware of this....

"We violated the tenets of the Geneva Convention. We violated our own principles and we violated the core of our military values. The stress of combat is not an excuse, and I believe, even today, that those civilian and military leaders responsible should be held accountable.” (emphasis mine)

Taguba doesn't say how they should be held accountable. But we could start with the impeachment of the commander-in-chief and courts martial for all involved in the chain of command. The above should be followed with referral to appropriate bodies for war crimes trials, to begin concurrent with a full withdrawal from Iraq.

UPDATE:

I wanted to include here a very useful comment from the Daily Kos thread for this story, by Snarcalita. It's an excellent analysis of what Hersh is reporting, and is often the case, is captured best by one of my readers:

Hersh hints around the SAP or Special Access Program, a highly-classified, compartmentalized operation that seems to have involved, among other things, Spec. Op.s teams operating from US Embassies with a literal license to kill, who formed kidnap teams filling the secret interrogation facilities. It seems the CIA was squeezed out of the covert ops business as a deliberate policy to avoid congressional oversight and covert ops reporting requirements. The Pentagon lawyers concluded that the unitary executive C-in-C could launch op.s to "prepare the battlefield" with no reporting requirements. Since, in a "Global War on Terror" the whole world is the battlefield, they basically seized carte blanche to run their own covert death squads. None of the investigators could be 'read in' to the details of these secret operations, though it seems they tried to indicate that the techniques of sexual humiliation and torture were taught by someone to the MP scapegoats who actually carried them out. It seems no accident that the prison was guarded by untrained National Guard units, rather than professional soldiers who would have known about procedure and their duty to refuse illegal orders and report war crimes.

Physicians for Human Rights Takes on American Psychological Association over Interrogations Issue

(Tip of the hat to Stephen Soldz over at Psyche, Science, and Society for this)

Executive Director Leonard Rubenstein of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has written a letter to Sharon Stephens Brehm, PhD, President of the American Psychological Association (APA), asking her to respond affirmatively to the recent revelations in a Pentagon Office of Inspector General report on detainee abuse. These revelations directly implicated military psychologists from the Pentagon's SERE program in "reverse engineering" POW resistance techniques from its schools for use as abusive interrogation guides and torture at Guantanamo Naval Base prison, and elsewhere.

Mr. Rubenstein's letter further lists a number of abusive practices, asking the APA to abjure 19 different unethical interrogation practices. (At least two of these practices, the use of drugs in interrogation, and the use of sensory bombardment or overload to "overwhelm the senses", have been studied by the APA, in conjunction with the CIA, in only the past three years. See my article on this from a few weeks back.)

In addition, beyond asking for APA to support the currently proposed moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations, put forth by internal opponents to the current APA policy, PHR is suggesting the following ethical position to guide psychologists in the murky waters of interrogation:

Psychologists do not participate directly in the interrogation of an individual prisoner or detainee. Direct participation includes being present in the interrogation room; asking questions; suggesting questions; providing any advice, consultation, or assistance regarding the use of interrogation techniques with a specific interrogation subject; or monitoring an interrogation for the purpose of offering advice, consultation, evaluation or assistance in the use of techniques with a particular subject.

Psychologists do not offer general advice or training, research, experimentation, facilitation, or any other general assistance, outside the context of an interrogation of a specific subject, regarding use of interrogation methods that are intended to, or that the psychologist has reason to believe will, result in increased levels of psychological distress or harm to the subject.

Many kudos to PHR and its Executive Director, Leonard Rubenstein, for taking on the issue of torture and bringing it to the doorstep of those who participate, and in certain instances, cover or alibi the use of torture and other cruel and inhumane treatment by U.S. military and spy personnel.

Link to original PHR letter in PDF format.

Hamdan Redux: Government Asks Judge to Reconsider Decision

Marty Lederman has an fascinating analysis over at Balkinization regarding the the government's appeal in the recent Hamdan and Khadr cases. The latter concerned the decision by U.S. military judges to dismiss charges against Salim Ahmed Hamdan of Yemen and Omar Khadr of Canada. They were charged as terrorists and labelled "unlawful enemy combatants", and were to be among the first cases to be brought before Bush's kangaroo military commissions. According to AP:

Hamdan's military judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, said the detainee is "not subject to this commission" under legislation passed by Congress and signed by President Bush last year.

Now the government is appealing Capt. Allred's decision, and Marty Lederman has read the motion on Hamdan and finds:

The oddest thing about the Hamdan motion, however, is that the government never really gives a persuasive factual account of why Hamdan is an enemy combatant, let alone an "unlawful enemy combatant" as that term is defined in the MCA....

More to the point, as I read it, those alleged facts simply do not establish, as the MCA requires, that Hamdan "purposefuly and materially supported hostilities against the United States."

Go read the entire piece. If you're ambitious you can read the motion on Hamdan, and also the motion on Khadr. (Lederman did not make an analysis of the latter, having not read it yet. But one suspects that much the same non-evidence will be presented there.)