World Change Cafe » Torture

Obama Administration Continues to Abuse State Secrets Privilege to Cover Up Misdeeds

admin — Sun, 18 Dec 2011 02:50:39 +0000

By Nancy Goldstein, Comment Is Free

Ben Wizner, the litigation director for the ACLU’s national security project, cheerfully admits that its April 2011 Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) request for 23 of the very same US State Department diplomatic cables we all read this time last year, when WikiLeaks released them to five newspapers including the Guardian, was “cheeky” – a way to foreground the “absurdity of the US secrecy regime”.

And so it has. Nearly eight months after the original FOIA request, the State Department has finally released … 11 cables. Federal censors have helpfully redacted them, making it easy to see, by a simple act of comparison (which the ACLU performs for us, here), precisely which sections the State Department wants hidden. Missing are a dirty dozen cables the government refused to release – despite those cables having already been leaked, published and analysed in virtually every major national and international media venue – again, because they were classified as secret or deemed to contain sensitive information.

Administration officials unleashed plenty of hyperbole and hysteria when the cables were first published. But it turned out that none of the information in them actually endangered American citizens, allies or informants. They did, however, prove embarrassing for the US and many foreign leaders. Because it turned out that claims about national security were often an excuse to prevent us from seeing our government engaged in unethical, unconstitutional and, sometimes, illegal practices. These ran the gamut from extraordinary renditions, detentions and torture to shaking down other governments in an attempt to influence their political processes and tamper with their criminal justice systems.

We learned that the same Obama administration that had refused to pursue the perpetrators of the Bush torture regime at home had also tried to put its thumbs on the scales of justice in Spain – aggressively attempting to prevent a counter-terrorism judge from trying the senior legal minds of the Bush administration for their part in the torture of detainees at Guantánamo Bay.

We learned about the US attempt to scuttle the case of German citizen Khaled el-Masri, the greengrocer mistaken for a senior al-Qaida official. He was kidnapped, tortured, drugged, beaten and thrown into Afghanistan’s CIA-run Salt Pit prison, until – oops – they realised they had the wrong guy and dumped him in the Albanian outback. In public, Munich prosecutors issued arrest warrants for 13 suspected CIA operatives involved in his abduction and torture, and Angela Merkel’s office called for an investigation. In private, the German justice ministry and foreign ministry both made it clear to the US that they were not interested in pursuing the case, emboldening the US to refuse to arrest or hand over the agents.

If the first part of the ACLU’s agenda in asking for the 23 already-leaked cables is to highlight what it calls a “penchant for excessive secrecy in defiance of all reason”, the second is to spotlight the way in which the Bush and Obama administrations abuse the state secrets privilege to keep illegal programs from being judicially reviewed.

When the ACLU challenged the CIA on behalf of el-Masri in 2005, a judge dismissed the case. The US government did not deny that he was wrongfully kidnapped. Instead, it successfully argued that his case be dismissed because litigation of his claims would expose state secrets and jeopardise American security. This despite the fact that, as el-Masri pointed out, “President Bush has told the world about the CIA’s detention program, and even though my allegations have been corroborated by eyewitnesses and other evidence.”

First the Bush administration and then the Obama administration successfully evoked the state secrets privilege to prevent the ACLU from filing a federal lawsuit against Jeppesen DataPlan, Inc, the folks who helped the CIA fly extraordinary rendition victims to secret sites where they were detained, tortured and interrogated. Again, the government claimed that further litigation would undermine national security interests, even though much of the evidence needed to try the case was already available to the public. And again, it appears to have won.

In the hall of mirrors that the US security regime has become, information that is not officially acknowledged cannot be used to hold government officials responsible in the courts. And an administration that can evade charges of misconduct, including torture, by hiding behind state secrets claims, even when all the details are publicly known, becomes the guardian of its own liability. That’s bad news.

Transparency and accountability are the oxygen of democracy. But don’t hold your breath waiting for this administration to respond to requests for either one.

Nancy Goldstein’s work has appeared in The Nation, The Guardian, NPR, Politico, Salon, Slate, The American Prospect, and the Washington Post, where she was an Editor’s Pick and the winner of the blogging round during their Next Great Pundit Contest.

This article was reposted from AlterNet.

Police Brutality In America

admin — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:21:14 +0000

By Stephen Lendman

13 July, 2010
Countercurrents.org

Across America, daily incidents occur, one of many the cold-blooded January 1, 2009 murder of Oscar Grant – unarmed, offering no resistance, thrust face-down on the ground, shot in the back, and killed, videotaped on at least four cameras for irrefutable proof. USA Today said five bystanders taped it.

His killer: Oakland, CA transit officer, Johannes Mehserle, tried for the killing, the jury told to consider four possible verdicts – innocent, second-degree murder, voluntary manslaughter, or involuntary manslaughter, jurors deciding the latter.

The Legal Dictionary defines it as “The act of unlawfully killing another human being unintentionally,” the absence of intent distinguishing it from voluntary manslaughter. Many states don’t define it or do it vaguely. Wallin & Klarich Violent Crime Attorneys say in California it carries a two – four year sentence. However, since a gun was used, Judge Robert Perry can add three to 10 additional years.

Because minority victims seldom get justice, especially against police, Mehserle may serve minimal time, then be paroled quietly when the current furor subsides.

After the verdict, it erupted on Oakland streets, hundreds turning out to protest, Bay Area indymedia.org saying:

“The actions of the Police in Oakland tonight (including dozens of arrests) show their disrespect for justice in General. Their heavy handed violence towards protestors just reinforces their total disconnect with the people of Oakland.” It’s as true everywhere across America, police acting like Gestapo, usually unaccountably.

Grant’s family will appeal the verdict and is suing the Bay Area Rapid Transit (BART) for $25 million, his mother Wanda Johnson saying “My son was murdered (and) the law has not held the officer accountable.” It rarely does for Black, Latino, or other minorities, no matter the injustice, civil rights lawyer John Burris, representing Grant’s family in the civil suit, saying:

“The system is rarely fair when a police officer shoots an African-American male.” Police brutality against them and other minorites is systemic, including beatings, torture, and cold-blooded murder, usually with impunity, justice nearly always denied.

While far from certain, the Obama administration may charge Mehserle with civil rights or hate crime violations, DOJ spokesman Alejandro Miyar saying:

“The Justice Department has been closely monitoring the state’s investigation and prosecution. The Civil Rights Division, the US Attorney’s Office, and the FBI have an open investigation into the fatal shooting and, at the conclusion of the state prosecution, will conduct an independent review of the facts and circumstances to determine whether the evidence warrants federal prosecution.”

Systemic Police Brutality

An earlier Jones Report.com text and video account headlined, “Epidemic of Police Brutality Sweeps America,” showing footage of police repeatedly tasering a student with 50,000 volts of electricity for questioning the 2004 election results at a campus meeting.

Torture’s Loopholes

admin — Thu, 28 Jan 2010 23:13:54 +0000

By MATTHEW ALEXANDER

Published in New York Times: January 20, 2010

TOMORROW will be one year since President Obama signed an executive order outlawing torture, yet our debate about interrogation methods continues. Though the president deserves praise for improving matters, the changes were not as drastic as most Americans think, and elements of our interrogation policy continue to be both inhumane and counterproductive.

Americans can now boast that they no longer “torture” detainees, but they cannot say that detainees are not abused, or even that their treatment meets the minimum standards of humane treatment mandated by the Geneva Conventions, the Detainee Treatment Act of 2005 (the so-called McCain amendment), United States and international law, or even Mr. Obama’s executive order.

If I were to return to one of the war zones today — as an Air Force officer, I was sent to Iraq to head an interrogation team in 2006 — I would still be allowed to abuse prisoners. This is true even though in my experience, torture or even harsh but legal treatment never got us useful information. Instead, such tactics invariably did just the opposite, convincing detainees to clam up.

The adoption last year of the Army Field Manual as the standard for interrogations across the government, including the C.I.A., was a considerable improvement. But we missed a unique opportunity for progress last August when the president’s task force on interrogations recommended no changes to the manual, which was hastily revised in 2006 in the aftermath of the Abu Ghraib torture scandal.

For example, an appendix to the manual allows the military to keep a detainee in “separation” — solitary confinement — indefinitely. It requires only that a general approve any extension after 30 days. Rest assured, there will be numerous waivers to even that minuscule requirement.

Yes, there are legitimate reasons to isolate detainees. Domestic law enforcement agencies do it to prevent suspects from colluding on alibis and allow investigators the leverage to use non-coercive interrogation techniques like confronting one detainee with the other’s statements.

But military interrogators do not operate in a vacuum. The consequences of their actions have far-reaching effects — like Al Qaeda’s exploitation of American abuse of prisoners as a recruiting tool. And, in any case, extended solitary confinement is torture, as confirmed by many scientific studies. Even the initial 30 days of isolation could be considered abuse.

If we truly wanted to come up with a humane limit on solitary confinement, we would look at the Golden Rule: what would we consider inhumane treatment if one of our own soldiers were captured by the enemy? My answer: Given the youth of our men and women in uniform, that number is probably around two weeks. This limit, however, should be determined by medical professionals, not soldiers or politicians.

The Army Field Manual also does not explicitly prohibit stress positions, putting detainees into close confinement or environmental manipulation (other than hypothermia and “heat injury”). These omissions open a window of opportunity for abuse.

The manual also allows limiting detainees to just four hours of sleep in 24 hours. Let’s face it: extended captivity with only four hours of sleep a night (consider detainees at Guantánamo Bay who have been held for seven years) does not meet the minimum standard of humane treatment, either in terms of American law or simple human decency.

And if this weren’t enough, some interrogators feel the manual’s language gives them a loophole that allows them to give a detainee four hours of sleep and then conduct a 20-hour interrogation, after which they can “reset” the clock and begin another 20-hour interrogation followed by four hours of sleep. This is inconsistent with the spirit of the reforms, which was to prevent “monstering” — extended interrogation sessions lasting more than 20 hours. American interrogators are more than capable of doing their jobs without the loopholes.

The Field Manual, to its credit, calls for “all captured and detained personnel, regardless of status” to be “treated humanely.” But when it comes to the specifics the manual contradicts itself, allowing actions that no right-thinking person could consider humane.

The greatest shame of the last year, perhaps, is that the argument over interrogations has shifted from debating what is legal to considering what is just “better than before.” The best way to change things is to update the field manual again to bring our treatment of detainees up to the minimum standard of humane treatment.

The next version of the manual should prohibit solitary confinement for more than, say, two weeks, all stress positions and forms of environmental manipulation, imprisonment in tight spaces and sleep deprivation. Unless we rewrite the book, we will only continue to give Al Qaeda a recruiting tool, to earn the contempt of our allies and to debase our most cherished ideals.

Matthew Alexander is the author of “How to Break a Terrorist.”

Originally published in the New York Times.

Study: Torture reports rose despite UN convention

admin — Tue, 15 Sep 2009 07:48:00 +0000

Newly published research suggests that government use of torture has increased worldwide despite international norms discouraging it.

The study, published in The Journal of Legal Studies, found that between 1985 and 2003, reports of state-sponsored torture collected by the U.S. State Department and Amnesty International increased, even as a growing number of countries signed on to the United Nations Convention Against Torture.

“The results could not be clearer: there is no evidence that as more states have joined the CAT, states’ use of torture has abated,” write study authors Michael Gilligan, a political scientist at New York University, and Nathaniel Nesbitt. “Indeed, if anything, the results suggest that levels of torture have increased.”

The U.N. enacted the CAT in 1987. By 2003, more than 75 percent of the world nations had signed on to the convention. But in spite of the growing consensus against torture, Gilligan and Nesbitt found that torture was still reported in 69 percent of the world’s nations in 2003. Moreover, the data suggest that CAT signatories were just as likely to torture as non-signatory nations.

“Our results suggest, quite simply, that torture is a practice in which leaders engage even though they know it is wrong,” the authors write.

“It may be possible to point to unscientifically selected cases where norms appear to have discouraged torture,” Gilligan said. “But over a long period and across a broad sample nations, there’s no evidence that nations are more constrained by an anti-torture norm.”

The authors used two different point scales to rate the prevalence of government-sponsored torture in each country. They used a statistical method to determine what factors appear to influence how often a nation tortures.

They found that torture reports are more prevalent in larger nations, nations plagued by civil war, and in dictatorships. Democracies and nations with a larger gross domestic product tended to have fewer torture reports.

The authors acknowledge that there are potential complications in studying torture. Most notably, their study tracks torture reports, not actual occurrences. It could be that actual occurrences of torture went down, but better reporting has created the illusion of an increase. However, Gilligan and Nesbitt find that explanation unlikely.

If better reporting alone were the reason for the results, the authors say, one would expect democracies-which are generally more open societies-to show a larger spike in torture reports than dictatorships. That didn’t happen. The results show that dictatorships report more torture than democracies. That finding is a strong indicator that actual torture-not just reports of torture-increased.

Just what might be driving the overall increase in torture is outside the bounds of this study, the authors say. But what this study makes clear is that an international consensus against torture appears to do little to discourage the practice.

“The findings in this paper are a disappointment to anyone who believes that an anti-torture norm can reduce the state practice of torture,” the authors conclude. “We could find no evidence to support that belief.”

###

Michael Gilligan and Nathaniel Nesbitt, “Do Norms Reduce Torture?” The Journal of Legal Studies Vol. 38:2

The Journal of Legal Studies is a journal of interdisciplinary academic research into law and legal institutions. It emphasizes social science approaches, especially those of economics, political science, and psychology, but it also publishes the work of historians, philosophers, and others who are interested in legal theory. The JLS was founded in 1972.

Reposted from University of Chicago Press Journals

Tell The Truth About Torture Through An Independent Commission

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 17:06:53 +0000

Just as the volume of calls for investigations into the U.S. torture program reached deafening levels this week, another classified report came out Tuesday that revealed new details about the military’s role in torturing detainees.

This latest report by the Senate Armed Services Committee exposes the “few bad apples” argument as a complete farce.¹ While the Bush Administration was publicly saying the horrors of Abu Ghraib were just aberrations, this report clearly shows that in fact, torture was sanctioned and even encouraged in military detention centers.

Thanks to citizen response over the past few weeks, the momentum for investigations is snowballing. Last Friday President Obama said this was a time for “reflection, not retribution”; less than a week later, national newspapers are reporting the President is now open to an investigation.²

But what kind of investigation? There’s a growing risk that we may get an investigation that lacks independence, legal authority, and the adequate funding necessary to tell the full truth about the illegal, U.S. torture program.

What we need is a non-partisan independent commission, free from political influences, that has subpoena power and enough money to track down every lead.³

Tell President Obama and Congress that any investigation must be independent, backed by the full force of law, and have enough funding to uncover the full truth behind the U.S. torture program.

Even with the release of this classified report, we still only know a portion of the truth. And it’s only by exposing the full truth of what was done in our names, that we can once and for all move forward and restore our nation’s credibility.

Let’s make sure whatever investigation moves forward, it’s backed by the authority and support it needs to be effective.

Please send your letter now to President Obama and Congress urging for an independent investigation backed by the full force of law and adequate funding.

In just one week, we’ve gone from seeing an investigation as a long shot, to talking about what kind of investigation we need. Your actions, phone calls, and visits before Congress are making an impact. We’re getting closer to seeing our government actually do the right thing.

Thanks for standing with us.

Njambi Good
Director, Counter Terror with Justice Campaign

1 http://www.nytimes.com/2009/04/22/us/politics/22report.html?hp
2 http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/04/21/AR2009042102187.html
3 http://www.amnestyusa.org/document.php?id=ENGAMR511512008

Investigate Torture

admin — Fri, 24 Apr 2009 09:38:28 +0000

To Torture or Not to Torture

admin — Sat, 07 Mar 2009 22:34:54 +0000

By William Blum

Being Serious About Torture . . . Or Not

In Cambodia they’re once again endeavoring to hold trials to bring some former senior Khmer Rouge officials to justice for their 1975-79 war crimes and crimes against humanity. The current defendant in a United Nations-organized trial, Kaing Guek Eav, who was the head of a Khmer Rouge torture center, has confessed to atrocities, but insists he was acting under orders.¹ As we all know, this is the defense that the Nuremberg Tribunal rejected for the Nazi defendants. Everyone knows that, right? No one places any weight on such a defense any longer, right? We make jokes about Nazis declaring: “I was only following orders!” (“Ich habe nur den Befehlen gehorcht!”) Except that both the Bush and Obama administrations have spoken in favor of it. Here’s the new head of the CIA, Leon Panetta: “What I have expressed as a concern, as has the president, is that those who operated under the rules that were provided by the Attorney General in the interpretation of the law [concerning torture] and followed those rules ought not to be penalized. And … I would not support, obviously, an investigation or a prosecution of those individuals. I think they did their job.”² Operating under the rules … doing their job … are of course the same as following orders.

The UN Convention Against Torture (first adopted in 1984), which has been ratified by the United States, says quite clearly, “An order from a superior officer or a public authority may not be invoked as a justification of torture.” The Torture Convention enacts a prohibition against torture that is a cornerstone of international law and a principle on a par with the prohibition against slavery and genocide.

Of course, those giving the orders are no less guilty. On the very day of Obama’s inauguration, the United Nation’s special torture rapporteur invoked the Convention in calling on the United States to pursue former president George W. Bush and defense secretary Donald Rumsfeld for torture and bad treatment of Guantanamo prisoners.³

On several occasions, President Obama has indicated his reluctance to pursue war crimes charges against Bush officials, by expressing a view such as: “I don’t believe that anybody is above the law. On the other hand I also have a belief that we need to look forward as opposed to looking backwards.” This is the same excuse Cambodian Prime Minister Hun Sen has given for not punishing Khmer Rouge leaders. In December 1998 he asserted: “We should dig a hole and bury the past and look ahead to the 21st century with a clean slate.”⁴ Hun Sen has been in power all the years since then, and no Khmer Rouge leader has been convicted for their role in the historic mass murder.

And by not investigating Bush officials, Obama is indeed saying that they’re above the law. Like the Khmer Rouge officials have been. Michael Ratner, a professor at Columbia Law School and president of the Center for Constitutional Rights, said prosecuting Bush officials is necessary to set future anti-torture policy. “The only way to prevent this from happening again is to make sure that those who were responsible for the torture program pay the price for it. I don’t see how we regain our moral stature by allowing those who were intimately involved in the torture programs to simply walk off the stage and lead lives where they are not held accountable.”⁵

One reason for the non-prosecution may be that serious trials of the many Bush officials who contributed to the torture policies might reveal the various forms of Democratic Party non-opposition and collaboration.

It should also be noted that the United States supported Pol Pot (who died in April 1998) and the Khmer Rouge for several years after they were ousted from power by the Vietnamese in 1979. This support began under Jimmy Carter and his National Security Adviser, Zbigniew Brzezinski, and continued under Ronald Reagan.⁶ A lingering bitterness by American cold warriors toward Vietnam, the small nation which monumental US power had not been able to defeat, and its perceived closeness to the Soviet Union, appears to be the only explanation for this policy. Humiliation runs deep when you’re a superpower.

Neither should it be forgotten in this complex cautionary tale that the Khmer Rouge in all likelihood would never have come to power, nor even made a serious attempt to do so, if not for the massive American “carpet bombing” of Cambodia in 1969-70 and the US-supported overthrow of Prince Sihanouk in 1970 and his replacement by a man closely tied to the United States.⁷ Thank you Richard Nixon and Henry Kissinger. Well done, lads.

By the way, if you’re not already turned off by many of Obama’s appointments, listen to how James Jones opened his talk at the Munich Conference on Security Policy on February 8: “Thank you for that wonderful tribute to Henry Kissinger yesterday. Congratulations. As the most recent National Security Advisor of the United States, I take my daily orders from Dr. Kissinger.”⁸

Lastly, Spain’s High Court recently announced it would launch a war crimes investigation into an Israeli ex-defense minister and six other top security officials for their role in a 2002 attack that killed a Hamas commander and 14 civilians in Gaza.⁹ Spain has for some time been the world’s leading practitioner of “universal jurisdiction” for human-rights violations, such as their indictment of Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet a decade ago. The Israeli case involved the dropping of a bomb on the home of the Hamas leader; most of those killed were children. The United States does this very same thing every other day in Afghanistan or Pakistan. Given the refusal of American presidents to invoke even their “national jurisdiction” over American officials-cum-war criminals, we can only hope that someone reminds the Spanish authorities of a few names, names like Bush, Cheney, Rumsfeld, Powell, Rice, Feith, Perle, Yoo, and a few others with a piece missing, a piece that’s shaped like a conscience. There isn’t even a need to rely on international law alone, for there’s an American law against war crimes, passed by a Republican-dominated Congress in 1996.¹⁰

The noted Israeli columnist, Uri Avnery, writing about the Israeli case, tried to capture the spirit of Israeli society that produces such war criminals and war crimes. He observed: “This system indoctrinates its pupils with a violent tribal cult, totally ethnocentric, which sees in the whole of world history nothing but an endless story of Jewish victimhood. This is a religion of a Chosen People, indifferent to others, a religion without compassion for anyone who is not Jewish, which glorifies the God-decreed genocide described in the Biblical book of Joshua.”¹¹

It would take very little substitution to apply this statement to the United States – like “American” for “Jewish” and “American exceptionalism” for “a Chosen People”.

Hell Hath No Fury Like an Imperialist Scorned

Hugo Chávez’s greatest sin is that he has shown disrespect for the American Empire. Or as they would say in America’s inner cities – He’s dissed the Man. Such behavior of course cannot go unpunished lest it give other national leaders the wrong idea. Over the years, the United States has gotten along just fine with brutal dictators, mass murderers, torturers, and leaders who did nothing to relieve the poverty of their population – Augusto Pinochet, Pol Pot, the Greek Junta, Ferdinand Marcos, Suharto, Duvalier, Mobutu, the Brazil Junta, Somoza, Saddam Hussein, South African apartheid leaders, Portuguese fascists, etc., etc., terrible guys all, all seriously supported by Washington at one time or another; for none made it a regular habit, if ever, to diss the Man.

The latest evidence, we are told, that Hugo Chávez is a dictator and a threat to life as we know it is that he pushed for and got a constitutional amendment to remove term limits from the presidency. The American media and the opposition in Venezuela often make it sound as if Chávez is going to be guaranteed office for life, whereas he of course will have to be elected each time. Neither are we reminded that it’s not unusual for a nation to not have a term limit for its highest office. France, Germany, and the United Kingdom, if not all of Europe and much of the rest of the world, do not have such a limit. The United States did not have a term limit on the office of the president during the nation’s first 162 years, until the ratification of the 22nd Amendment in 1951. Were all American presidents prior to that time dictators?

In 2005, when Colombian President Alvaro Uribe succeeded in getting term limits lifted, the US mainstream media took scant notice. President Bush subsequently honored Uribe with the American Presidential Medal of Freedom. But in the period leading up to the February 15 referendum in Venezuela, the American media were competing with each other over who could paint Chávez and the Venezuelan constitutional process in the most critical and ominous terms. Typical was an op-ed in the Washington Post the day before the vote, which was headlined: “Closing in on Hugo Chávez”. Its opening sentence read: “The beginning of the end is setting in for Hugo Chávez.”¹²

For several years now, the campaign to malign Chávez has at times included issues of Israel and anti-Semitism. An isolated vandalism of a Caracas synagogue on January 30th of this year fed into this campaign. Synagogues are of course vandalized occasionally in the United States and many European countries, but no one ascribes this to a government policy driven by anti-semitism. With Chávez they do. In the American media, the lead up to the Venezuelan vote was never far removed from the alleged “Jewish” issue.

“Despite the government’s efforts to put the [synagogue] controversy to rest,” the New York Times wrote a few days before the referendum vote, “a sense of dread still lingers among Venezuela’s 12,000 to 14,000 Jews.”¹³

A day earlier, a Washington Post editorial was entitled: “Mr. Chávez vs. the Jews – With George W. Bush gone, Venezuela’s strongman has found new enemies.”¹⁴ Shortly before, a Post headline had informed us: “Jews in S. America Increasingly Uneasy – Government and Media Seen Fostering Anti-Semitism in Venezuela, Elsewhere.”¹⁵

So commonplace has the Chávez-Jewish association become that a leading US progressive organization, Council on Hemispheric Affairs (COHA) in Washington, DC, recently distributed an article that reads more like the handiwork of a conservative group than a progressive one. I was prompted to write to them as follows:

Dear People,

I’m very sorry to say that I found your Venezuelan commentary by Larry Birns and David Rosenblum Felson to be remarkably lacking. The authors seem unable, or unwilling, to distinguish between being against Israeli policies from anti-semitism. It’s kind of late in the day for them to not have comprehended the difference. They are forced to fall back on a State Department statement to make their case. Is that not enough said?

They condemn Chávez likening Israel’s occupation of Gaza to the Holocaust. But what if it’s an apt comparison? They don’t delve into this question at all.

They also condemn the use of the word “Zionism”, saying that “in 9 times out of 10 involving the use of this word in fact smacks of anti-Semitism.” Really? Can they give a precise explanation of how one distinguishes between an anti-Semitic use of the word and a non-anti-semitic use of it? That would be interesting.

The authors write that Venezuela’s “anti-Israeli initiative … revealingly transcends the intensity of almost every Arabic nation or normal adversary of Israel.” Really. Since when are the totally gutless, dictator Arab nations the standard bearer for progressives? The ideal we should emulate. Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Jordan are almost never seriously and harshly critical of Israeli policies toward the Palestinians. Therefore, Venezuela shouldn’t be?

The authors state: “In a Christmas Eve address to the nation, Chávez charged that, ‘Some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ … took all the world’s wealth for themselves’. Here, Chávez was not talking so much about Robin Hood, but rather unquestionably dipping into the lore of anti-Semitism.” Well, here’s the full quote: “The world has enough for all, but it turns out that some minorities, descendants of the same ones who crucified Christ, descendants of the same ones who threw Bolivar out of here and also crucified him in their own way at Santa Marta there in Colombia …” Hmm, were the Jews so active in South America?

The ellipsis after the word “Christ” indicates that the authors consciously and purposely omitted the words that would have given the lie to their premise. Truly astonishing.

After Chávez won the term-limits referendum with about 55% of the vote, a State Department spokesperson stated: “For the most part this was a process that was fully consistent with democratic process.” Various individuals and websites on the left have responded to this as an encouraging sign that the Obama administration is embarking on a new Venezuelan policy. At the risk of sounding like a knee-reflex cynic, I think this attitude is at best premature, at worst rather naive. It’s easy for a State Department a level-or-so above the Bushies, i.e., semi-civilized, to make such a statement. A little more difficult would be accepting as normal and unthreatening Venezuela having good relations with countries like Cuba, Iran and Russia and not blocking Venezuela from the UN Security Council. Even more significant would be the United States ending its funding of groups in Venezuela determined to subvert and/or overthrow Chávez.

You’ve Got to Be Carefully Taught

I’ve been playing around with a new book for awhile. I don’t know if I’ll find the time to actually complete it, but if I do it’ll be called something like “Myths of U.S. foreign policy: How Americans keep getting fooled into support”. The leading myth of all, the one which entraps more Americans than any other, is the belief that the United States, in its foreign policy, means well. American leaders may make mistakes, they may blunder, they may lie, they may even on the odd occasion cause more harm than good, but they do mean well. Their intentions are honorable, if not divinely inspired. Of that most Americans are certain. And as long as a person clings to that belief, it’s rather unlikely that s/he will become seriously doubtful and critical of the official stories.

It takes a lot of repetition while an American is growing up to inculcate this message into their young consciousness, and lots more repetition later on. Think of some of the lines from the song about racism from the Broadway classic show, “South Pacific” – “You’ve got to be taught” …

You’ve got to be taught
from year to year.
It’s got to be drummed
in your dear little ear.
You’ve got to be taught
before it’s too late.
Before you are 6 or 7 or 8.
To hate all the people
your relatives hate.
You’ve got to be carefully taught.

The education of an American true-believer is ongoing, continuous. All forms of media, all the time. Here is Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, the highest military officer in the United States, writing in the Washington Post recently:

We in the U.S. military are likewise held to a high standard. Like the early Romans, we are expected to do the right thing, and when we don’t, to make it right again. We have learned, after seven years of war, that trust is the coin of the realm – that building it takes time, losing it takes mere seconds, and maintaining it may be our most important and most difficult objective. That’s why images of prisoner maltreatment at Abu Ghraib still serve as recruiting tools for al-Qaeda. And it’s why each civilian casualty for which we are even remotely responsible sets back our efforts to gain the confidence of the Afghan people months, if not years. It doesn’t matter how hard we try to avoid hurting the innocent, and we do try very hard. It doesn’t matter how proportional the force we deploy, how precisely we strike. It doesn’t even matter if the enemy hides behind civilians. What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it. In the end, all that matters is that, despite our best efforts, sometimes we take the very lives we are trying to protect. … Lose the people’s trust, and we lose the war. … I see this sort of trust being fostered by our troops all over the world. They are building schools, roads, wells, hospitals and power stations. They work every day to build the sort of infrastructure that enables local governments to stand on their own. But mostly, even when they are going after the enemy, they are building friendships. They are building trust. And they are doing it in superb fashion.¹⁶

How many young servicemembers have heard such a talk from Mullen or other officers? How many of them have not been impressed, even choked up? How many Americans reading or hearing such stirring words have not had a lifetime of reinforcement reinforced once again? How many could even imagine that Admiral Mullen is spouting a bunch of crap? The great majority of Americans will swallow it. When Mullen declares: “What matters are the death and destruction that result and the expectation that we could have avoided it”, he’s implying that there was no way to avoid it. But of course it could have been easily avoided by not dropping bombs on the Afghan people.

You tell the true-believers that the truth is virtually the exact opposite of what Mullen has said and they look at you like you just got off the Number 36 bus from Mars. Bill Clinton bombed Yugoslavia for 78 days and nights in a row. His military and political policies destroyed one of the most progressive countries in Europe. And he called it “humanitarian intervention”. It’s still regarded by almost all Americans, including many, if not most, “progressives”, as just that.

Now why is that? Are all these people just ignorant? I think a better answer is that they have certain preconceptions; consciously or unconsciously, they have certain basic beliefs about the United States and its foreign policy, most prominent amongst which is the belief that the US means well. And if you don’t deal with this basic belief you’ll be talking to a stone wall.

1. Associated Press, August 1, 2007.

2. Press conference, February 25, 2009, transcript by Federal News Service.

3. Agence France Presse (AFP), January 20, 2009.

4. New York Times, December 29, 1998.

5. Associated Press, November 17, 2008.

6. See William Blum, Rogue State, chapter 10 (“Supporting Pol Pot”).

7. See William Blum, Killing Hope, chapter 20 (“Cambodia, 1955-1973″).

8. Tinyurl

9. Reuters news agency, January 30, 2009.

10. The War Crimes Act (18 U.S.C. 2441).

11. Haaretz, leading Israeli newspaper, January 30, 2009.

12. Washington Post, February 14, 2009, column by Edward Schumacher-Matos.

13. New York Times, February 13, 2009.

14. Washington Post, February 12, 2009.

15. Washington Post, February 8, 2009.

16. Washington Post, February 15, 2009, p. B7.

Reprinted from Dessident Voice.

Replication of Milgram’s Shocking Experiments Proves 70 Percent of People will Torture Others if Ordered

admin — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 10:12:35 +0000

by Mike Adams, NaturalNews Editor

(NaturalNews) The Milgram experiments from the early 1960′s are classic (but shocking) studies that demonstrated the “sheeple-ness” of people everywhere. In the experiments — which have been replicated numerous times across multiple cultures, races and age ranges — subjects willingly engaged in administering extremely painful electric shocks to other human beings for no reason other than the fact they were ordered to do so by an apparent authority figure.

These studies have long demonstrated the “do what I’m told” mentality of approximately 70 percent of the population. Only 30 percent of the study subjects refused to torture fellow human beings when so ordered.

Now, this famous study has been replicated at Santa Clara University in California. It’s important to understand that in none of these studies were humans actually being tortured or given electric shocks, but the study subjects believed they were administering such torture because the apparent recipients of the electric shocks were actors who screamed in pain to coincide with the apparent delivery of the electric shocks.

The true “subjects” of the study were actually the people recruited to administer the electric shocks. But as is common in many psychological experiments, they were told they were simply taking part in the study of the other person (the person being shocked), and they had to administer electric shocks to that person if they answered questions incorrectly. Meanwhile, the study “enforcer” (one of the true researchers running the whole thing) would command the administration of such electric shocks at increasingly painful levels, starting at low voltage and increasing the voltage well beyond 150 volts (which can be lethal).

The real reason why most people are willing to do whatever they’re told

What’s amazing about these experiments is the astonishing willingness of people to deliver shocks above 150 volts to victims who are writhing in pain, screaming and begging for them to stop. Using nothing more than the application of verbal authority, these study subjects continued to torture and apparently cause great pain and suffering to another human being.

For many years, psychologists speculated the original studies must have somehow been flawed. Humans beings couldn’t be so cruel and gullible, could they? But now this repeating of the study immediately clobbers any debate on the subject and forces us all to confront the terrible reality: Most human beings of all ages, races, religions, cultural upbringings and professions will actively torture, harm and even kill fellow human beings if ordered to do so.

Why is this important to understand? Because it explains the sheeple effect that’s so dominant in society today. Why do consumers obey apparent authorities so blindly? Why do they do what they’re told even when it goes against all common sense and their own ethics?

You might hear many scientists offer a conventional explanation for this phenomenon, where they’re talking about the power and leverage of authority symbols (such as the study researcher wearing a white lab coat) or the transmission of implied authority through voice commands and body language, but I have a different explanation for what we’re seeing here.

My explanation is far simpler: Modern society trains human beings to be mind slaves, not independent thinkers.

You were raised to be a mind slave

Think about it: From the very first day you go to kindergarten, you’re punished for getting out of line (literally), talking out of place, expressing your own ideas or refusing to follow commands. This psychological brow-beating goes on for thirteen years, and it’s enforced by most parents, counselors and other authority figures.

In fact, the primary point of school is not to teach children things that are really true (American history, for example, is a laughable collection of outrageous lies and distortions), but rather to create an obedient mind slave that can function in society. By the time the average child graduates from high school, they may not know how to read or write, but they sure know how to do what they’re told.

For many, this continues through college and graduate school. Medical schools, for example, are advanced brainwashing institutions where independent thinkers are rejected from the system long before they can practice medicine.

Only the arts or the theoretical sciences encourage free thinking, and that’s why you’ll find the most free-minded people in areas like theoretical physics, fine arts, dance, music, poetry and so on. (There are exceptions in every area, of course. I’m just talking about general trends.)

The delusional behavior surrounding holidays

The cultural madness surrounding holidays is a perfect example of brainwashing en masse. On command, people all across America will obey their commercial masters and go Christmas shopping. They’ll put up Christmas lights and props and trees. And a few days later, they’ll take them all down again. Ten months later, the same yards that used to host symbols of Jesus, angels and religious symbols will be replaced with images of bloody skeletons, vampires, decapitated human bodies and supernatural spirits.

Apparently nobody thinks this is strange other than myself and a few other free thinkers. I watch may neighbors with amazement as they cart off the bloody vampire props, store them away in their garages, and light up their yards with angels and Biblical scenes. These people have no idea they are totally brainwashed into following a system of commercial exploitation called “holidays.”

You name the holiday, and there’s a whole different system of commercially-motivated brainwashing behind it: Easter, Valentine’s day, Fourth of July, New Year’s Day, etc. On each holiday, the people obediently buy what they’re told, drink what they’re told, put up the props in their yards that they’re told, and even run around knocking on doors begging for candy because that’s what they’re told to do.

It’s utterly amazing to observe. I’m not saying we can’t celebrate the Christmas holiday for what it really stands for, or spend quality time with family, or bless each other in whatever religious tradition we hold true. Those are all legitimate times of gathering, or celebration, or giving thanks. What I’m talking about is the commercial massploitation of the sheeple and how willingly people go along with the whole thing of spending money and decorating their yards with the appropriate symbols that merely serve as signs that demand other people get in line and follow suit.

I seriously considered putting up Halloween decorations this Christmas, because my neighbors erected a carnival of flashing lights and motorized reindeer so obnoxious that, in my mind, it was just begging to be contrasted with a scene of decapitated human bodies and bloody zombies taken from somebody’s stored Halloween props. But I couldn’t bring myself to actually BUY any of that stuff, and I figured the whole message would be wasted on the mindless neighbors anyway. But I reserve the right to try this next year! In fact, I’d love to see somebody do this and post a video of it on YouTube.

Seriously, folks: Why is it okay to have symbols of dead bodies and supernatural spirits in your yard on October 31st but not December 31st? Free thinkers don’t have to follow the commercial calendar, didn’t you know? We can put holiday props in our yards whenever we want, and they don’t have to match YOUR holiday expectations.

Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer. Had a very shiny… decapitated head? I’ll bet 99% of the people on the ‘net don’t even know where Rudolf the red-nosed reindeer came from. He was invented by the Macy’s department store as a clever story designed to sell more stuff! Every time we sing that song, it’s like singing a commercial. Let’s all go Christmas caroling and sing TV commercial jingles, shall we?

Truly, holiday behavior reveals the best examples of insanity in modern society. And it’s all happening right in front of your (shiny?) nose, oblivious to the common man (and woman).

Are you a free thinker, or an “obedient worker?”

The Milgram experiments merely prove that America’s brainwashing education system is very, very good at producing what George Carlin called obedient workers. These obedient workers do what they’re told, pay their taxes and will even follow orders that make no sense — like Bush and Obama urging people to go out and spend more money in order to “help the economy.”

It’s senseless advice for a nation where the savings rate is already zero, but the 70 percent who are obedient workers also turn out to be obedient spenders and consumers.

Needless to say, NaturalNews is only read by the 30 percent who would walk out of the Milgram experiment. We are the independent, free-minded thinkers who evaluate each situation on its own merits, paying no special attention to the mad ramblings of apparent authority figures. In fact, the typical NaturalNews reader would blatantly refuse to administer electric shocks to another human being in any experiment. Unless, of course, the recipients of those electric shocks happened to be drug company CEOs, but that’s a different experiment altogether. (That’s also a joke. I don’t condone the use of violence against fellow human beings; even criminals.)

The upshot of all this is one, important realization: About 70 percent of the people around you are dangerously obedient to even the most insane directives given by apparent authority figures. And if properly motivated, they would even torture YOU as long as they were told to do so.

To invoke the philosophy of The Matrix, about 70 percent of the people are still plugged in to the system, and until their minds are freed, they are potentially a danger to the 30 percent who can actually think for themselves. A good rule of thumb is to never be caught with too many 70-percenters around you. Hang with the 30-percenters.

Most people greatly overestimate their mental independence

There’s another fascinating element to all this: Virtually everyone thinks they would never administer the electric shocks if they took part in the Milgram experiments. But when faced with the aggressive verbal demands of the researcher, they give in and punch the shock button anyway.

Just like most authority figures in modern society, the study researchers use clever psychological tactics to try to convince people they have to push the button. They’ll claim that if they don’t cooperate, the study will be ruined, or thousands of dollars will be lost, or the apparent “patient” will be somehow harmed by not receiving the proper correction stimulus. The researchers use every verbal tactic they can think of.

It’s a lot like President Bush standing at a podium and talking about yellow cake uranium, or issuing a “terr” threat, or using all kinds of verbal scare tactics that are completely fictitious. The point is not to inform you but rather to alter your behavior so you do what they want. Not coincidentally, about 70 percent of the American people were also strongly in favor of the War on Iraq following the 9/11 attacks.

I can’t wait to read the haters and flamers post negative comments to this story, because what they’re actually doing is demonstrating the depth of the brainwashing they have embraced as 70-percenters. People who are brainwashed into obeying orders will aggressively defend the very system that brainwashed them. Any person threatening to think for themselves gets slammed, criticized or verbally abused in much the same way that the Milgram experimenters verbally abused the study subjects to cajole them into obeying.

Authority is all in your head

The relevant point in all this is to realize that the whole scheme of authority in the modern world is artificially constructed. Authority exists only in your mind, not in the real world. For example, when people drive on the roads, they’re afraid to cross the yellow lines (or white lines). Why? Because in their minds, the lines represent borders that cannot be crossed due to the fear of being reprimanded by authority. This is true even when crossing the lines makes sense!

You see this behavior all the time in modern society. At Costco, people just wait at the exit for some lame worker to check their receipt and mark it with a pen. People actually line up like cattle even after they paid for their stuff! I just walk out the door with the stuff I paid for, utterly ignoring the silly “receipt checkers” who keep screaming “Sir! Sir! Sir!” What I’ve learned is that after three or four screams, they just shut up and go back to the line of sheeple. Just slap on a pair of headphones, crank up your iPod and walk right out of the store, folks. Why are you giving up your Constitutional rights and submitting yourself to illegal search and seizure for a cart full of stuff you just paid for? (Moooooo!)

Same thing at Wal-Mart. If your bags set off the security device, don’t be an idiot and actually stop and let them search your bags like you’re some kind of criminal! And yet more than 90% of the people will do exactly that! (More Moooooo!)

Just keep walking. You didn’t steal your stuff, did you? Then what are you stopping for? The fact that the security alert sounds off is Wal-Mart’s problem, not your problem. You have nothing to do with their security glitches. Just pretend you’re deaf and couldn’t hear the thing anyway. If they accost you, use lots of sign language that emphasizes the use of the middle finger.

Behavioral psychologist Pavlov proved that he could make a dog drool by ringing a bell. Wal-Mart has proven that you can make a human being stop and turn around by sounding a similar bell at the exit door. Amazing!

You’ll also find that most people tend to walk on the official pathways when they enter or leave buildings. They don’t take the shortest path; they take the “official” path, which may be much longer.

And don’t get me started talking about television commercials. There’s a great example of highly-effective brainwashing that nobody even seems to notice. People who watch TV will swear up and down that the commercials don’t affect them at all, and then they’ll go to the store and buy exactly the same brand names advertised to them on television.

It’s downright hilarious.

It’s not hilarious that they’re brainwashed. That’s just sad. What’s hilarious is that people have been brainwashed into thinking they’re NOT brainwashed even while they are! “The terrorists hate freedom,” we’re told, which implies that we’re all free. Oh really? Then why do all my neighbors do exactly the same thing on every holiday? Why are they as predictable as a line of puppets strung up to the same control device?

The Milgram experiments simply prove that the vast majority of people are really sheeple who will do what they’re told, even with zero awareness of being influenced.

So if you’re a true free thinker, consider yourself fortunate: You’re already in the top 30 percent of all the people in the country.

By the way, standard IQ tests don’t take into account anything resembling real-world intelligent that would involve thinking for yourself. A person can have an IQ of 170 and still be a total robot zombie that does exactly what they’re told by anyone with sufficient authority status.

I’d rather hang with a high school dropout who has some real-world street smarts than an over-educated yes man who’s little more than a puppet for the mind controllers.

People live their entire lives in a state of perpetual hypnosis

By the way, as a side note, every time we run a story on NaturalNews about hypnosis, we get a few pieces of hate mail from people who claim hypnosis is evil and based on some sort of occult witchcraft.

What they don’t realize is that the very beliefs they are demonstrating in their emails to us are perfect examples of hypnosis! (The belief that “hypnosis is evil,” for example, is a hypnotically-induced belief usually programmed into somebody by an authority figure in a competing belief system that sees hypnosis as a threat to their own authority.)

Most people walk through their whole lives hypnotized and rarely, if ever, snap out of it long enough to think for themselves. The Milgram experiments demonstrate a very effective form of command hypnosis, by the way, which has been proven again and again to work on 70 percent of the population.

Most people are running around hypnotized most of the time. And some of them are medicated at the same time, which makes for a rather psychotic combination: Medicated and hypnotized!

Needless to say (but I’m gonna say it anyway), typically the most easily hypnotized people end up finding career paths in law enforcement, the military or government jobs where following orders is readily accepted. Again, there are exceptions to this (in fact, we’ve got some awesome NaturalNews readers in the military stationed in Iraq right now), but generally speaking, the easily-brainwashed seek professions that are compatible with doing what you’re told while disengaging your brain.

I don’t know why people tend to get so uptight about this topic, by the way. I’m just telling you the way it is, and I’m not sugar-coating it. The majority of the people are actually sheeple in disguise. And that means the majority of the U.S. voters are, in fact, the very same people who would be willing to torture a fellow human being if ordered to do so!

Now you know why watching politicians seems to hurt so much.

By the way, I’ve authored a book that teaches you how to stop being a commercially-exploited mind slave and protect your mind from the seduction of consumerism. It’s called Spam Filters for Your Brain and you can get it here: http://www.truthpublishing.com/spamfilt…

If you value the freedom of your own mind, you’ll love this book. It’s strictly for the 30-percenters who can think for themselves.

Reprinted from NaturealNews.

American Credibility on Trial

admin — Mon, 08 Sep 2008 08:06:09 +0000

Was one of the youngest prisoners at Guantánamo rushed to court by the Bush administration for political reasons?

By Jo Becker, children’s rights advocacy director

Published in Salon.com

Aug. 20, 2008 | GUANTÁNAMO BAY, Cuba — One of the youngest detainees at Guantánamo Bay, a 23-year-old Afghan named Mohammed Jawad , spent two days in a courtroom here last week as his defense lawyer argued that his case should never go to trial. The attorney, Maj. David Frakt, claimed that his client was repeatedly tortured and abused in U.S. custody, charges that were supported by the testimony of a senior U.S. Army criminal investigator.

Perhaps just as troubling, Frakt also asserted that partisan politics played a role: Prosecutors handling the case, he said, were pressured by a Pentagon lawyer to bring charges against Jawad quickly — before the next American presidential election drew too close.

Jawad is accused of attempted murder for allegedly throwing a grenade into a U.S. military vehicle in Afghanistan in December 2002. Two U.S. soldiers and their Afghan translator were injured in the attack. Jawad was 16 or 17 years old at the time (he doesn’t know his exact birth date). Given that he was an adolescent at the time of his capture, arguably he has been treated illegally under international law by his American captors.

Prosecutors for the U.S. military commissions say Jawad is a dangerous terrorist. But Frakt says that Jawad was a naive, illiterate teenager who was duped into joining a militia group and was coerced into signing a false confession after the attack and his capture.

The U.S. government concedes that Jawad was neither a member of al-Qaida nor part of the Taliban, and shortly after his arrival at Guantánamo, it concluded he had no intelligence value. Yet among approximately 260 Guantánamo detainees, he is one of only 20 whom the U.S. has currently slated for trial by the U.S. military commissions.

During last week’s hearing, Frakt argued that Jawad was charged as a result of the political interference of the military commissions’ legal advisor, Brig. Gen. Thomas Hartmann. Testimony in this and other cases lends credence to Frakt’s argument: The former chief prosecutor for the commissions, Col. Morris Davis — who resigned late last year claiming that Hartmann had pressured him to bring charges against detainees before the presidential campaigns got too far under way — testified in June that Gen. Hartmann has pressed his office to prioritize Jawad over other cases.

Davis said that Hartmann was frustrated with the slow pace of prosecutions at Guantánamo, and believed that Jawad’s alleged attack against U.S. soldiers would “capture the American imagination” with him as a trial subject. Unlike many other pending cases at Guantánamo, which are based on charges of conspiracy or material support for terrorism, Hartmann was reportedly drawn to Jawad’s case because, as he put it, the young man had “blood on his hands.”

Testifying before a different judge in another case on Aug. 13, Davis stated that “Jawad went from the freezer to the frying pan, thanks to General Hartmann.” He said that during a three-month period after Hartmann became legal advisor for the military commissions, Jawad rose from approximately “number 25 or 30″ on the prosecution’s list of priorities to “number one.”

Hartmann had previously been prevented from acting as legal advisor in a Guantánamo case. In May, another judge, Navy Capt. Keith Allred, barred Hartmann from that role in the case against Salim Hamdan — the detainee convicted earlier this month for serving as Osama bin Laden’s driver — based on similar complaints that he had improperly interfered with the prosecution in the case.

The military judge in Jawad’s case, Col. Stephen Henley, rejected the argument that Gen. Hartmann had improperly influenced the charges against Jawad. However, he barred Hartmann from playing any role in the post-trial review of the case, reasoning that Hartmann’s public statements aligning himself with the prosecution compromised the objectivity necessary to perform that review. (Under the military commissions’ rules, every trial is automatically reviewed by the convening authority, and Hartmann — as the commissions’ legal advisor — would normally be required to provide advice during the post-trial review.)

Last week’s hearing also focused on defense claims that Jawad has been tortured while in U.S. custody. To make his case, Frakt called Army special agent Angela Birt as a witness. Birt investigated the deaths of detainees at Bagram Air Force Base in Afghanistan in late 2002. Jawad was detained at Bagram at the time, prior to his transfer to Guantánamo in early 2003.

Birt described U.S. soldiers’ abuse of detainees at Bagram as “the worst I’ve ever seen.” She didn’t make the judgment lightly: She has 18 years of experience as an investigator with the Army’s Criminal Investigation Division and has investigated some 2,000 cases over the course of her career.

Birt said she interviewed Jawad in 2004 as part of her investigation of abuses at Bagram. Jawad told Birt that while at Bagram he had been beaten and kicked by guards, shackled and hooded, deprived of sleep, forced to stand for lengthy periods, and shoved down a flight of stairs. Jawad said that military police chained him to the door of his cell, and if he tried to sit or lie down, they would enter his cell and force him to stand. He said he often heard the screams and cries of other detainees. Jawad complained of a broken nose, chest pain and problems in urination as a result of his treatment.

Birt testified that his account was similar to those of many other detainees at Bagram.

In a statement to the military judge last week, Frakt described Bagram “not as a detention camp, but as a torture chamber,” and renewed a motion to dismiss the charges against Jawad because of his alleged torture and mistreatment.

Jawad’s reported abuse did not end at Bagram. On Wednesday, Army Maj. Jason Orlich, formerly an officer with the detainee operations group at Guantánamo, took the stand to answer questions about sleep deprivation tactics used on Jawad at Guantánamo. Known as the “frequent flyer program,” the program entailed moving detainees frequently from cell to cell, typically every two or three hours, to deprive them of sleep. In May 2004, Jawad was moved 112 times during a 14-day period. According to Frakt, Department of Defense guidance limits sleep deprivation to a maximum of four days.

When asked if he believed such treatment was “humane,” Maj. Orlich replied “yes.” He testified that the program was intended to “maintain order and discipline” and to prevent detainees from throwing urine and feces or organizing attacks on guards. Orlich claimed that those subjected to the program were violent detainees — but according to Jawad’s attorney, Guantánamo disciplinary records show no violent behavior by Jawad. The most serious offense recorded against Jawad was “cross-block talking.”

In addition to the “frequent flyer program,” Jawad was reportedly subject to two 30-day periods of isolation. The first occurred in early 2003, just after his arrival at Guantánamo, when he was still not yet 18 (or 17) years old. He was kept in an uncomfortably hot cell, and allowed no copy of the Quran or human contact apart from an occasional interrogation. He was isolated for an additional 30-day period later that year, in September and October. American Correctional Association standards limit isolation for juveniles to five days.

Jawad attempted suicide soon after the second isolation period, in December 2003, but military psychologists reported in both 2004 and 2008 that Jawad had no mental problems. Amazingly, they had determined that for Jawad to be diagnosed with depression, “his condition has to interfere with one of seven ‘major life activities.’” As his attorney remarked wryly: “At Guantánamo, Jawad has no major life activities.”

Judge Henley is expected to announce in late September whether he will dismiss the charges against Jawad on the grounds of torture.

Before recessing on Aug. 14, the judge also surprised observers with an unusual and unprecedented aspect to his ruling. He ordered the senior government official responsible for the military commissions, Susan Crawford, to review the charges against Jawad, consider additional information from the defense and confirm whether she wants to proceed with the case. The basis for the judge’s order was his finding that Gen. Hartmann had failed to include extenuating and mitigating information on Jawad’s case when recommending in October 2007 that Crawford confirm the charges against Jawad.

It’s possible that Crawford will choose not to pursue the case against Jawad at all. According to Maj. Frakt, “This case would never survive scrutiny if they had done a proper pretrial investigation.”

Crawford must decide by Sept. 25 whether the case against Jawad will go forward.

Reprinted from Human Rights Watch.

In Defense of the Guillotine

admin — Mon, 26 May 2008 10:32:49 +0000

American People’s Exit Strategy

By Andres Kargar

I don’t know if you have seen Bernardo Bertolucci’s movie The Last Emperor. I saw it a long time ago and, by now have forgotten most details of the story, but there is one scene that never leaves my mind. I think the scene has stayed with me because politics in the United States quite often remind me of that scene which continues to spook me out to this day.

Pu Yi, the last Emperor of China is being held prisoner as a traitor and a war criminal in the People’s Republic of China. While in detention, he encounters a peasant one day who recognizes him. Instead of assailing the Emperor, which would have been the natural reaction of an oppressed subject to the encounter with the parasitic dictator-turned-Japanese- collaborator, the peasant kneels down to tie the Emperor’s shoes.

How many times have we seen this scene repeated in American politics? Didn’t we vote for Nancy Pelosi and other Democrats to deliver our antiwar message to Congress only to be stabbed in the back by them? And what about when we told Congressman John Conyers and others that the impeachment of George Bush and Dick Cheney should be on the table? Do we have any idea why, despite our protests and manifestations, both the Democrats and Republicans plan to continue squandering our much needed tax dollars by dragging on the Iraq War and perhaps even expanding it to Iran, Syria, or Lebanon? Why don’t we, the informed citizens hold our “representatives” accountable for their actions?

Would this be the residue of a culture of slavery which continues to linger on in America? After all, of the tens of thousands of southerners who fought with the Confederate army and gave their lives to preserve slavery, only a small handful was actual slave-owners. The majority were poor, ordinary citizens conscripted or brainwashed to consider it an honor and a duty to fight for and sustain the southern plantation way of life.

I think, however, the problem goes beyond that. The tragedy of many American liberals and some in the left, in my opinion, is their persistent denial of the existence of classes in the society and the role of class war which continues to dominate and shape the American politics as in any other society.

A natural outcome of such a denial is that the crimes and acts of hostility of the owning classes towards the people are then often taken as “misinformed”, “misguided”, or “mistaken”. That’s when you hear silly comments such as: “I can’t understand why despite our economic woes, President Bush insists on tax breaks for the rich” or “I am so shocked to find out that Nancy Pelosi had been aware of the practice of torture against Guantanamo detainees.”

“We just don’t understand why Democrats don’t stop the government’s spying on US citizens”, and a million dead Iraqis later, Bush is still not a mass murderer who is acting on behalf of America’s corporate interests but a confused and incompetent president who “mistakenly” believes that Iraq possessed weapons of mass destruction, and of course, Adolf Hitler was just some mad man …

Today, America is left with an economy in shambles. The neoconservatives (who by the way, did not just fall from the sky) have greatly eroded our personal liberties and made a mockery of the Constitution and the concept of separation of the branches of the government. Our educational infrastructure is in dire condition. The country’s healthcare system is near collapse and quite unaffordable to millions of Americans. Thanks to the neoconservatives, America is now viewed and hated as a symbol of torture, arrogance, and thievery around the world, and on and on, and yet there are those in our progressive midst who naively believe that Hillary or Obama are going to bring about significant changes. Imagine President Obama or Clinton carrying on the legacy of the Bush signing statements or initiating the bombing of Iran to appease Israel.

Can a system that does not even allow a presidential candidate to say that the people are “frustrated and bitter”, which is quite an understatement, in any way reflect the aspirations of the majority of the American people?

Don’t get me wrong. I myself have often voted for many of these Democrats, in hopes of creating some breathing space for the common people and as a tactic for bringing about divisions among the owning classes, and I do believe that there are genuine differences between the Democrats and the Republicans, but looking at the picture from the perspective of “us versus them”, I view the Democrats, just like the Republicans, as true representatives of the corporate and the owning minority and therefore not friends of the American people. They might utilize different methods than the Republicans, but when it comes down to class interests, they sell us out without hesitation as they always have in the past. To paraphrase this, in a good cop, bad cop performance, the Democrats have generally played the role of the good COP.

How meager are our aspirations for the future of our country! Would we be content with someone who can perhaps close down one or two of the many torture chambers for which the US is now infamous, bring back a portion of our troops from Iraq, or maybe sink us even deeper in the Middle East, and continue snooping through our phone calls and email messages while increasing the dictatorial powers of the government in the name of “war on terror” and “national security”?

Today’s world is facing some unprecedented and life-threatening challenges: the crisis with fossil fuels, the global warming disaster, the resulting poverty, disease epidemics, and the imminent decline of an empire. The Republican and Democratic response to these challenges is international belligerence theorized under the so-called “War on Terror” and tightening the screws inside the United States: increased spying activities against US citizens, eroding personal liberties, internment camps, and drastic cuts in public spending. Needless to say, such policies can only increase the gap between the rich and the poor, augment social tensions, and bring about further worldwide insecurity. The only ones benefiting from such policies are a handful of corporations that control the media and other pillars of power, the likes of Halliburtons, KBR, Blackwater . . . . The people in their millions, on the other hand, will be condemned to a life of increasing austerity and misery.

When the citizens of France sent Louis XVI and Marie Antoinette to the guillotine in 1793, theirs was not an act of savagery but one of culture and resistance, for you either witness the majority of the masses at the bottom get crushed while the society sinks into a culture of corruption and despair, or you help crush the few at the top and hand power to the people. Desperate times call for desperate measures, and the French were able to rise up to the occasion.

More than two centuries later, here in America, the people are in the grips of yet another despot, much more brutal, corrupt, and destructive than King Louis XVI: American corporatism. This one is bent on destroying, not only America but the environment and the world with it. Just like King Louis, the corporate rule has to be dealt with to save the humanity.

“The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants,” wrote Thomas Jefferson in November 1787. Six years later, the rising masses in France took up similar slogans when they rebelled against the tyranny of the King.

This is by no means an invitation to violence of any kind, for I am a man of peace, but it is the people’s inalienable right to decide the type of society they would like to live in, its economic infrastructure, and the culture and democratic institutions that go with it. I realize this is easier said than done, especially since the “when” and the “how” is not so clear and still needs to be worked out, but as long as our focus is the farcical electoral process, we will never be able to strategize any meaningful and far-reaching changes.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with going to the polls and voting for your favorite candidate – the one that you think can do the least amount of harm, but as Noam Chomsky put it in one of his interviews, “the election is a marginal affair, it should not distract us from the serious work of changing the society and the culture and the institutions, creating a democratic culture.”

Unfortunately, America has sustained enormous damage during the years of the Reagan-Bush-Clinton-Bush administrations. With the merger of corporatism and the government, we are well on our way down the slippery slope of dictatorship and fascism, American-style, as much as many of us hate to admit. It is only in this light that the actions of the US intelligence agencies in spying on Americans, the suspension of personal liberties, and the establishment of internment camps (under the pretense of apprehending “illegal aliens”) can be viewed and understood. We should not accept such a dismal future for our children. We cannot swallow the big lie and remain silent. With every passing day we are losing our ability to reverse the mishap more and more.

Andres Kargar can be reached at: galileo19@hotmail.com

This article was originally posted on Dissident Voice.

CIA Admits to Existence of 7,000 Documents on Secret Detention, Rendition, and Torture

admin — Thu, 01 May 2008 00:06:12 +0000

NEW YORK and WASHINGTON, DC – April 23 – The Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) must stop stonewalling congressional oversight committees and release vital documents related to the program of secret detentions, renditions, and torture, three prominent human rights groups said today. Amnesty International USA (AIUSA), the Center for Constitutional Rights (CCR) and the International Human Rights Clinic at NYU School of Law (NYU IHRC) reiterated their call for information, following the CIA’s filing of a summary judgment motion this week to end a lawsuit and avoid turning over more than 7,000 documents related to its secret “ghost” detention and extraordinary rendition program. This motion is in response to a Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) lawsuit filed in federal court last June by these groups. The organizations will file their response brief next month.

Among other assertions, the CIA claimed that it did not have to release the documents because many consist of correspondence with the White House or top Bush administration officials, or because they are between parties seeking legal advice on the programs, including guidance on the legality of certain interrogation procedures. The CIA confirmed that it requested — and received — legal advice from attorneys at the Department of Justice Office of Legal Counsel concerning these procedures.

“For the first time, the CIA has acknowledged that extensive records exist relating to its use of enforced disappearances and secret prisons,” said Curt Goering, AIUSA senior deputy executive director. “Given what we already know about documents written by Bush administration officials trying to justify torture and other human rights crimes, one does not need a fertile imagination to conclude that the real reason for refusing to disclose these documents has more to do with avoiding disclosure of criminal activity than national security.”

The CIA’s admission that it possesses at least 7,000 documents relating to rendition, secret detention and torture generated renewed calls by the human rights groups for transparency and accountability from the government.

“The Freedom of Information Act is one of the major checks on government criminality in this country,” said CCR Executive Director Vincent Warren. “The CIA has acknowledged that it has well over 7,000 documents that relate to the torture and disappearance of men. These include some of our clients, like Majid Khan, who were known to be in the program. The public needs to know what crimes were committed in our name and how they were justified. This has been the most secretive, least transparent administration in history, and it is well past time for accountability.”

AIUSA, CCR, and NYU IHRC have filed FOIA requests with several U.S. government agencies, including the CIA. These FOIA requests sought information about individuals who are — or have been — held by the U.S. government or detained with U.S. involvement, and about whom there is no public record. The requests also sought information about the government’s legal justifications for its secret detention and extraordinary rendition program. Comprehensive information about the identities and locations of prisoners in CIA custody — as well as the conditions of their detention and the specific interrogation methods used against them — has never been publicly revealed. This lack of transparency continues to prevent scrutiny by the public or the courts and leaves detainees vulnerable to abuse and torture.

Although the CIA did release a paltry number of documents in response to the FOIA request, most were already in the public domain, such as newspaper articles and a single copy of the Fourth Geneva Convention which governs the treatment of civilians in times of war. The limited relevant documents that were released were documents pertaining to briefings demanded by the House and Senate Intelligence Committees regarding various aspects of the overseas detention and interrogation program.

Documents released to plaintiffs by the CIA demonstrate that many within the government itself have been unable to obtain accurate information from the CIA. These documents, which include letters from Members of Congress to the CIA, demonstrate a pattern of withholding information from Congress. In a pointed bipartisan letter on October 16, 2003, then-Chair and Ranking Member of the House Select Committee on Intelligence requested that CIA Director George Tenet provide senior level briefings on the treatment of, and information obtained by, three men known to be held in secret CIA detention, admonishing the CIA by stating that the committee was “frustrated with the quality of the information” provided in past briefings.

The CIA appears to have avoided answering detailed requests for specific information, responding instead with form letters and references to briefings. These practices led to a forceful letter from Senator Carl Levin, Current Chairman of the Senate Committee on Armed Services, (then the Ranking Member) who was attempting to investigate CIA involvement in detainee deaths. In a letter dated Oct. 24, 2005, Senator Levin noted that “[t]he lack of CIA cooperation with the investigations to date has left significant omissions in the record.” The CIA’s failure to cooperate with members of Congress demonstrates the need for public scrutiny of the secret detention and extraordinary rendition program under FOIA.

“The CIA has employed illegal techniques such as torture, enforced disappearances, and extraordinary rendition,” said Meg Satterthwaite, Director of the NYU IHRC. “It cannot use FOIA exemptions as a shield to hide its violations of U.S. and international law.”

In its legal filings, the CIA acknowledged that this program “will continue.” Some prisoners have been transferred to prisons in other countries for proxy detention where they face the risk of torture and where they continue to be held secretly, without charge or trial. Human rights reports indicate that the fate and whereabouts of at least 30 people believed to have been held in secret U.S. custody remain unknown.

In September 2006, President Bush publicly acknowledged the existence of CIA-operated secret prisons. At the same time, 14 detainees from these facilities were transferred to Guantánamo and several more have arrived since. The administration has admitted to using so-called “alternative interrogation procedures” on those held in the CIA program, including waterboarding. The international community and the United States, in other contexts, have unequivocally deemed these techniques torture.

For more information or copies of the CIA’s legal filings and released documents, please contact ssingh@aiusa.org, jnessel@ccrjustice.org or opgenhaffen@juris.law.nyu.edu.

For more information about the organizations involved, please see their websites: http://www.amnestyusa.org/, http://www.ccrjustice.org/, or http://www.chrgj.org/

To see the most recent documents from this CIA filing, go to http://www.ccrjustice.org/newsroom/press-releases/cia-foia-documents

US/Jordan: Stop Renditions to Torture

admin — Sat, 12 Apr 2008 01:40:14 +0000

CIA Transfer of Suspects to Jordan for Interrogation Violates International Law

(New York, April 8, 2008) – The US Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) transferred at least 14 terrorist suspects to Jordanian custody for interrogation and torture since the September 11, 2001 attacks, Human Rights Watch said in a new report released today.

The 36-page report, “Double Jeopardy: CIA Renditions to Jordan,” documents how Jordan’s General Intelligence Department (GID) served as a proxy jailer and interrogator for the CIA from 2001 until at least 2004. While a handful of countries received persons rendered by the United States during this period, no other country is believed to have held as many as Jordan.

“The Bush administration claims that it has not transferred people to foreign custody for abusive interrogation,” said Joanne Mariner, terrorism and counterterrorism director at Human Rights Watch. “But we’ve documented more than a dozen cases in which prisoners were sent to Jordan for torture.”

Based largely on firsthand information from Jordanian former prisoners who were detained with the non-Jordanian terrorism suspects, the report describes eight previously unknown cases of rendition. The new cases include Ibrahim “Abu Mu’ath” al-Jeddawi, whose statements may have been relied upon as evidence in US status review proceedings at Guantanamo Bay, and Khayr al-Din al-Jaza’eri, whose alleged activities were mentioned in a high-profile terrorism prosecution in France. None are known to have been charged with a criminal offense.

The report also excerpts a handwritten note from one of the rendered prisoners, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, which he wrote while in Jordanian custody in late 2002. The note, which al-Sharqawi marked with his thumbprint, says that GID interrogators beat him “in a way that does not know any limits.”

The note continues: “They threatened me with electricity, with snakes and dogs …. [They said] we’ll make you see death …. They threatened to rape me.”

The GID appears to have systematically used torture and cruel or inhuman treatment against the detainees rendered by the CIA to Jordan. A common torture method was falaqa, by which prisoners are given extended beatings on the bottoms of their feet.

“Just about everyone at GID was beaten with sticks,” a Jordanian former prisoner told Human Rights Watch. “People were beaten on their feet. They did it in the basement.”

In a meeting with Human Rights Watch in Amman in late August 2007, senior GID officials denied that the GID had held prisoners rendered by the United States. They also denied that torture was practiced in GID detention. However, given the weight of credible evidence showing otherwise, their denials are unconvincing, Human Rights Watch said.

The exact number of people that the United States has subjected to rendition abroad is not known. CIA Director Michael Hayden suggested in a September 7, 2007 speech before the Council on Foreign Relations that far fewer than 100 people – “mid-range two figures” – had been rendered abroad since the September 11, 2001 attacks.

Human Rights Watch believes that the prisoners rendered to Jordan included at least five Yemenis, three Algerians, two Saudis, a Mauritanian, a Syrian, a Tunisian, and one or more Chechens from Russia. They may also have included a Libyan, an Iraqi Kurd, a Kuwaiti, one or more Egyptians, and a national of the United Arab Emirates.

These prisoners include five men currently held at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba – Ramzi bin al-Shibh, Hassan bin Attash, Ali al-Hajj al-Sharqawi, Jamal Mar’i, and Mohamedou Ould Slahi – as well as one man now believed to be in custody in Saudi Arabia: Ibrahim “Abu Mu’ath” al-Jeddawi. Ibn al-Sheikh al-Libi, currently in custody in Libya, may also have been held in Jordan for a time.

The current whereabouts of several other former prisoners are unknown or unconfirmed, though some of them were likely returned to their countries of origin, which include Syria, Algeria, and Iraq.

Human Rights Watch called upon the US government to repudiate the use of rendition to torture as a counterterrorism tactic and permanently discontinue the CIA’s rendition program. It said that Jordan should open an immediate judicial inquiry into the GID’s use of torture, ill-treatment, and arbitrary detention.

“Outsourcing torture is not only wrong, it’s illegal,” Mariner said. “And the US can’t say it doesn’t torture if it sends people to countries that do.”

Reprinted from Human Rights Watch.

Why Torture Made Me Leave the APA

admin — Fri, 07 Mar 2008 23:40:50 +0000

After two years of working to reform the position of the American Psychological Association, which supports psychologist participation in the interrogations of detainees at Guantanamo, CIA “black site” prisons, and elsewhere, I realized that I had been pursuing a utopian objective. On January 27th, I penned my resignation to APA. The rationale for my choice is outlined in the resignation letter, which is reproduced here.

–Jeffrey S. Kaye, Ph.D

January 27, 2008

Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.,
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232

Dear Dr. Kazdin,

I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.

Unlike some others who have left APA, my resignation is not based solely on the stance APA has taken regarding the participation of psychologists in national security interrogations. Rather, I view APA’s shifting position on interrogations to spring from a decades-long commitment to serve uncritically the national security apparatus of the United States. Recent publications and both public and closed professional events sponsored by APA have made it clear that this organization is dedicated to serving the national security interests of the American government and military, to the extent of ignoring basic human rights practice and law. The influence of the Pentagon and the CIA in APA activities is overt and pervasive, if often hidden. The revelations over the Constitution and behavior of the 2005 Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS) panel are a case in point. While charged with investigating the dilemmas for psychologists involved in military interrogations in the light of the scandals surrounding Guantanamo’s Camp Delta and Abu Ghraib prison, it was stacked with military and governmental personnel, and closely monitored and pressured by APA staff.

I strongly disagree with APA’s current position on interrogations and am unimpressed with recent clarifications of that position that allow for voluntary non-participation in specifically defined cases where torture and abuse of prisoners is proven to exist. I have discussed my reasoning for this elsewhere, both in public and blogging on the Internet. In 2007, I was a panelist in a “mini-convention” held at the APA Convention in San Francisco, which examined the dispute over interrogations, presenting my findings on secret and non-secret psychologist research into isolation, sensory deprivation and sensory overload.

The following is a review of my objections to APA policy and practices:

1) APA’s position on non-involvement in torture allows psychologists to work in settings that do not allow the basic right of habeas corpus, in addition to practices of humane confinement as delineated in the Conventions of the Geneva Protocols and various international documents and treaties.

2) APA maintains, in private communications, that relegating various modes of psychological torture (sleep deprivation, sensory deprivation, isolation) and the use of drugs in interrogations to something less than outright prohibition in recent APA position papers does not mean APA had any intention of providing a “loophole” for interrogators in the practice of coercive interrogations. APA also promises to clarify its position on these matters in an “ethics casebook.” When it has found it exigent, as with the PENS resolution, to step outside normal procedure to clarify its position, it has done so. I find it noteworthy that recent APA clarifications of its position are treated as something requiring less than direct organizational expression.

3) APA continues to propagate a position that it knows is false: that psychologists operate in interrogation settings to prevent abusive interrogations. While sometimes citing the compelling conclusions about context and behavior outlined by Zimbardo, and stemming from his famous Prisoner Experiment, it twists the representation of this research by making psychologists a quasi-police force monitoring abusive interrogations. On the contrary, the Zimbardo research leads to a more unsettling conclusion, i.e., that human beings in general are susceptible to participation in abusive behavior based upon contextual factors. In fact, the Zimbardo research argues, as Dr. Zimbardo himself has done, against participation in these kinds of interrogations.

4) APA has shown little interest in the many revelations regarding psychologist participation in torture, or in psychologist research into abusive or coercive interrogations. Excepting only a brief period in the late 1970s, when widespread and public exposure of CIA mind-control programs raised considerable scandal, APA has shown little inclination to confront the history of psychologist participation in such research, nor of its own institutional role in this research.

5) Finally, recent APA activities, such as the joint CIA/Rand Corporation/APA July 2003 workshop in the “Science of Deception,” point to questionable current participation in unethical practices and illegal governmental activities. I queried relevant actors and APA leaders as to what actually occurred at this workshop, which the APA Science Directorate described as discussing how to use “pharmacological agents to effect apparent truth-telling behavior.” Also considered was the study of “sensory overloads on the maintenance of deceptive behaviors.” Workshop participants were asked, “How might we overload the system or overwhelm the senses and see how it affects deceptive behaviors?” I never received any answer from relevant APA personnel, including the current director of ethics, about what went on at this workshop.

The latter episode captures the terrible trap into which APA has fallen. When making agreements with state intelligence and military agencies, it is customary to sign secrecy agreements. This makes it impossible to reasonably assess and monitor the activities of psychologists in national security settings. Furthermore, the subordination of military psychologists to the chain of command of the armed forces allows for ineffective, if not impossible, oversight of psychologist activities. But the problem with secrecy does not end there. Major researchers — including a former APA president — who have contracted with the government or had their work utilized by the military … have told me they are unable to discuss matters beyond a certain point, or else have tried to restrict discussion of these matters, no doubt due in part to secrecy restrictions.

In the book Psychology in the Service of National Security, published by the APA in 2006, A. David Mangelsdorff, the editor, writes, “As the military adjusts to its changing roles in the new national security environment, psychologists have much to offer.” He notes the recent forward military deployment of psychologists, their use in so-called anti-terrorism research, and assistance in influencing public opinion about “national security problems facing the nation.” L. Morgan Banks, Chief of the Psychological Applications Directorate of the U.S. Army Special Operations Command, and a member of the controversial PENS panel, wrote elsewhere in the same book about the “bright future” for psychologists working with Special Operations Forces. Never mind that SOPs have been implicated in torture in Afghanistan — including receiving instructions in coercive procedures from some of the same psychologists who attended the APA/CIA workshop noted above. Nowhere in the book could I find a discussion of ethical problems surrounding these issues, nor of the political and social questions implicit in such outright support of governmental initiatives and military policy. In fact, curiously, there is no discussion of psychologist participation in military interrogations anywhere in the book.

Despite otherwise notable and positive stances and activities of the APA on other social issues — such as combating prejudice against gays and lesbians, or against racial prejudice — it is an unfortunate but urgent fact that APA has become subordinated to the state when it comes to military matters. APA acts as an arm of the Pentagon and a support agency for the CIA. Those differences that exist between the APA and the Bush Administration on interrogation policies mirror differences within the administration itself, and within different governmental departments. In these cases, APA acts as the instrument of a faction within government, rather than as an independent actor and representative of the profession and its ideals and goals.

I would suggest the following remedies, if any are still possible, to reverse the degeneration of the APA into a willing instrument of U.S. military and intelligence interests:

1) A full opening of all APA archives related to research and participation in activities with the military, including its intelligence arms, and a call for the government to declassify all documents related to the same;

2) The disestablishment of Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, from the APA;

3) The immediate rescission of APA’s Ethics Code 1.02, which was changed in 2002 to permit adherence “to the requirements of the law, regulations, or other governing legal authority” when there is otherwise a conflict between the law and psychologists’ ethical practice. Opponents of 1.02 have rightly compared it to the Nazi defense of “following orders” at Nuremberg;

4) A call for the formation of a civilian cross-disciplinary investigatory panel to examine the past history and current collaboration of scientific and medical professionals with the government, especially its military and intelligence agencies, to encompass fields as diverse as psychology, anthropology, linguistics, and sociology, with a goal of producing recommendations on interactions between government and the scientific and medical communities;

5) A moratorium on research into interrogations;

6) Sever the link that ties APA’s definition of “cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment or punishment” in its various resolutions from the Reagan-era Reservations to the UN Convention Against Torture, which seeks to weaken that definition by relying on suspect interpretations of U.S. law rather than international definitions;

7) The immediate cessation of all support for involvement of psychological personnel in participation in any activity that supports national security interrogations.

The sordid history of American psychology when it comes to collaboration with governmental agencies in the research and implementation of techniques of psychological torture is one that our field will have to confront sooner or later. In a larger sense, the problems presented here are inherent in a larger societal dilemma regarding the uses of knowledge. This problem was recognized by the first critics of untrammeled scientific advance, and represented powerfully by Goethe’s Faust, and Mary Shelley’s Doctor Frankenstein. Human knowledge is capable of producing both good and evil. The scientist, the scholar, and the doctor hold tremendous responsibility in their hands. That they have not shown themselves, in a tragic number of instances, to ethically wield or control this responsibility has meant that the 21st century opens under the awful prospect of worldwide nuclear, biological, and chemical warfare, while a sinister, behaviorally-designed torture apparatus operates as the servant of nation-states wielding these awful weapons of mass destruction.

It’s appropriate to close with a statement about the problem of serving powerful national interests from a former president of the APA, a leading and important pioneer in our field, and also, for awhile, a member with top secret clearance in the CIA’s MKULTRA mind control program, Carl Rogers. One wonders if Rogers’ exposure to the world of secret government military projects didn’t inform his feelings about psychologists and government, as expressed in his famous debate with another seminal psychologist, B. F. Skinner:

“To hope that the power which is being made available by the behavioral sciences will be exercised by the scientists, or by a benevolent group, seems to me a hope little supported by either recent or distant history. It seems far more likely that behavioral scientists, holding their present attitudes, will be in the position of the German rocket scientists specializing in guided missiles. First they worked devotedly for Hitler to destroy the U.S.S.R. and the United States. Now, depending on who captured them, they work devotedly for the U.S.S.R. in the interest of destroying the United States, or devotedly for the United States in the interest of destroying the U.S.S.R. If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power.”

Sincerely yours,

Jeffrey Kaye, Ph.D.
San Francisco, CA

Jeffrey Kaye is a psychologist active in the anti-torture movement. He works clinically with torture victims at Survivors International in San Francisco, CA. As “Valtin,” he regularly blogs at Daily Kos, Docudharma, American Torture, Progressive Historians, and elsewhere.

Animal Abuse and Human Abuse: Partners in Crime

admin — Sun, 02 Mar 2008 23:25:42 +0000

Cruel acts toward animals have long been recognized as indicators of a dangerous psychopathy that often claims more than animal victims. “Murderers … very often start out by killing and torturing animals as kids,” according to Robert K. Ressler, who developed profiles of serial killers for the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI).(1) Studies have now convinced sociologists, lawmakers, law enforcement officials, and the courts that acts of cruelty to animals deserve our attention. They can be the first sign of a violent pathology that includes human victims.

Cruelty to Animals: The First of Many Crimes?

Acts of cruelty to animals are not mere indications of a minor personality flaw in the abuser; they are symptomatic of a deep mental disturbance. Research in psychology and criminology shows that people who commit acts of cruelty to animals don’t stop there-many of them move on to their fellow humans.

Studies have shown that violent and aggressive criminals are more likely to have abused animals as children than criminals considered non-aggressive.(2) A survey of psychiatric patients who had repeatedly tortured dogs and cats found that all of them had high levels of aggression toward people as well.(3) According to a New South Wales newspaper, a police study in Australia revealed that “100 percent of sexual homicide offenders examined had a history of animal cruelty.”(4) To researchers, a fascination with cruelty to animals is a red flag in the lives of serial killers and rapists; according to the FBI’s Ressler, “These are the kids who never learned it’s wrong to poke out a puppy’s eyes.”(5)

Examples That Make the Headlines: Notorious Killers

History is replete with serial killers whose violent tendencies were first directed at animals. Albert DeSalvo, the “Boston Strangler,” who killed 13 women, trapped dogs and cats and shot arrows at them through boxes in his youth.(6) Serial killer Jeffrey Dahmer had impaled frogs, cats, and dogs’ heads on sticks.(7) Dennis Rader, the so-called “BTK” killer, who terrorized people in Kansas, wrote in a chronological account of his childhood that he hanged a dog and a cat.(8) During the trial of convicted sniper Lee Boyd Malvo, a psychology professor testified that the teenager, who killed 10 people with a rifle, had “pelted-and probably killed-numerous cats with marbles from a slingshot when he was about 14.”(9)

The deadly violence that has shattered schools in recent years has, in most cases, begun with cruelty to animals. High-school killers such as 15-year-old Kip Kinkel in Springfield, Oregon, and Luke Woodham, 16, in Pearl, Mississippi, tortured animals before starting their shooting sprees.(10) Columbine High School students Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold, who shot and killed 12 classmates before turning their guns on themselves, spoke of mutilating animals to their classmates.(11)

“There is a common theme to all of the shootings of recent years,” says Dr. Harold S. Koplewicz, director of the Child Study Center at New York University. “You have a child who has symptoms of aggression toward his peers, an interest in fire, cruelty to animals, social isolation, and many warning signs that the school has ignored.”(12)

Sadly, many of these criminals’ childhood violence went unexamined-until it was directed at humans.

‘The Link’ Next Door: Cruelty to Animals and Family Violence

Because abusers target the powerless, crimes against animals, spouses, children, and the elderly often go hand in hand. Children who abuse animals may be repeating a lesson learned at home; like their parents, they are reacting to anger or frustration with violence. Their violence is directed at the only individual in the family more vulnerable than themselves: an animal.

Parents who neglect or abuse an animal frequently subject their own children to similar hardships. Indiana residents Jade M. Jonas and Michael R. Smith faced felony charges stemming from authorities’ reported discovery of their two children and three dogs languishing in their filthy home. According to news sources, officials first found a tethered dog deprived of food and water outside the home. Upon entering the couple’s residence, investigators reportedly found a 3-month-old boy lying near piles of feces, trash, and rotten food; a half-clothed toddler; and two additional dogs.(13) In another case, Illinois authorities found 40 parasite-ridden dogs languishing amid 6 inches of feces on property occupied by John Morris. According to news reports, officials responding to neighbors’ concerns found the sick and emaciated dogs confined to filthy animal carriers before confirming that three children-ages 3, 10, and 15-lived in the horrific conditions as well.(14)

Sixty percent of more than 50 New Jersey families being treated for child abuse also had animals in the home who had been abused.(15) In three separate studies, more than half of the battered women surveyed reported that their abuser threatened or injured their animal companions.(16) In one of those studies, one in four women said that she stayed with the batterer because she feared leaving the animal behind.(17)

Stephen Williams was charged with cruelty to animals, child cruelty, and aggravated assault in Georgia after allegedly hacking to death his wife’s puppy with an ax and threatening to decapitate her with the same weapon-all in front of three horrified children.(18) Scott Maust of Pennsylvania was charged with corruption of minors, making terroristic threats, and cruelty to animals after allegedly shooting his family’s dog with a .22-caliber firearm, ordering his four children to clean up the bloody scene, and threatening to kill them if they told anyone.(19)

Stopping the Cycle of Abuse

Schools, parents, communities, and courts that shrug off cruelty to animals as a “minor” crime are ignoring a time bomb. Instead, courts should aggressively penalize animal abusers, examine families for other signs of violence, and order perpetrators to undergo psychological evaluations and counseling. Communities must recognize that abuse to any living individual is unacceptable and endangers everyone.

In March 2006, Maine Governor John Baldacci signed a law-the first of its kind in the United States-that permits judges to include animal companions in court-issued protection orders against domestic abusers. Those who harm animals in violation of a court order can face fines and jail time.(20)

Baltimore police who file domestic violence reports are required to note the presence and condition of animal companions. The Boston Police Department partners with the New England Animal Control/Humane Task Force to detect and respond to domestic violence associated with cruelty investigations. The New Jersey Coalition for Battered Women works with animal control to identify signs of domestic violence.

Additionally, children should be taught to care for and respect animals in their own right. After an extensive study of the links between animal abuse and human abuse, two experts concluded, “The evolution of a more gentle and benign relationship in human society might be enhanced by our promotion of a more positive and nurturing ethic between children and animals.”(21)

What You Can Do

Urge your local school, law enforcement agencies, prosecutors, and judges to take cruelty to animals seriously. Those charged with protecting our communities and animals must send a strong message that violence against any feeling creature-human or nonhuman-is unacceptable.
Be aware of signs of neglect or abuse in children and animals and immediately report suspected crimes to authorities. Take children seriously if they report that animals are being neglected or mistreated. Some children won’t talk about their own suffering but will talk about an animal’s.
Don’t ignore even minor acts of cruelty to animals by children. Talk to the child and the child’s parents. If necessary, call a social worker.

References

1) Daniel Goleman, “Experts See Parallels Between Dahmer, Previous Serial Killers,” New York Times News Service, 11 Aug. 1991.
2) Sara C. Haden and Angela Scarpa, “Childhood Animal Cruelty: A Review of Research, Assessment, and Therapeutic Issues,” The Forensic Examiner 14 (2005): 23-33.
3) Alan R. Felthous, M.D., “Aggression Against Cats, Dogs, and People,” Child Psychology and Human Development 10 (1980): 169-77.
4) “Animal Cruelty; Common in Many Killers,” Sunbury Macedon Regional 26 Apr. 2005.
5) Ruth Larson, “Animal Cruelty May Be a Warning. Often Precedes Harm to Humans,” The Washington Times 23 Jun. 1998.
6) Andrea Vance, “10-Year-Old Luke Kicked a Lamb to Death Like a Football,” News of the World (U.K.), 23 Jan. 2005.
7) Goleman.
Tim Potter, “BTK Describes His Own Crimes,” The Wichita Eagle 16 Jul. 2005.
9) Paul Bradley and Kiran Krishnamurthy, “Right and Wrong ‘An Illusion’/Psychologist Who Met With Malvo Said Teen’s Disorder Limited His Moral Judgment,” Richmond Times Dispatch 9 Dec. 2003.
10) Deborah Sharp, “Abuse Will Often Cross Species Lines,” USA Today 28 Apr. 2000.
11) Mitchell Zuckoff, “Loners Drew Little Notice,” Boston Globe 22 Apr. 1999.
12) Ethan Bronner, “Terror in Littleton: The Signs; Experts Urge Swift Action to Fight Depression, Isolation, and Aggression,” The New York Times 22 Apr. 1999.
13) “Police Remove Children From Filthy House,” Associated Press, 17 Jun. 2005.
14) John H. Croessman, “Filthy Find,” Du Quoin Evening Call 8 Dec. 2004.
15) Elizabeth Deviney et al., “The Care of Pets Within Child Abusing Families,” International Journal for the Study of Animal Problems 4 (1983): 321-9.
16) David Crary, “Program Links Domestic Abuse, Pets,” Associated Press, 11 Mar. 2001.
17) Sharp.
18) “Man Accused of Killing Puppy With Ax as Children Begged Him to Stop,” Associated Press, 17 Nov. 2003.
19) “Man Charged With Threatening Children Over Dead Family Dog,” Associated Press, 28 Feb. 2004.
20) Sharon Kiley Mack, “Law Protects Pets of Abuse Victims,” Bangor Daily News 1 Apr. 2006.
21) Stephen R. Kellert and Alan R. Felthous, “Childhood Cruelty Toward Animals Among Criminals and Noncriminals,” Human Relations 38 (1985): 1113-29.

Reprinted from People for the Ethical Treatment of Animals.