( – promoted by buhdydharma )

When earlier this month the ACLU released a new slew of FOIA documents — unredacted portions of Admiral Church’s 2005 report on detainee abuses at “war on terror” prisons abroad — the spin machine of the American Psychological Association sprang into action. APA propagandist, and Ethics Director, Stephen Behnke was called upon to take up the cudgels, whereupon he wrote an unctious, dissembling letter to the ACLU.

In a letter dated May 15, Behnke praised ACLU for “uncovering details surrounding the treatment of detainees at detention facilities run by the U.S. government around the world.” Then he reiterated APA’s paper commitment to “the humane treatment of detainees.” In between the lofty presentation of ideals and grand commitments, Behnke also made the following points (quoting from his letter, which has circulated via email, but not to my knowledge is online — bold text below is my editorial emphasis):

We find what is revealed about abuse in the newly released documents abhorrent. The position of the American Psychological Association is clear and unequivocal: There is never a justification for torture or abuse. In carefully reviewing the documents, we note that according to the information obtained by the ACLU, psychologists supporting interrogations “emphasized their separation from detainee medical care,” and that a psychologist who suspected abuse “recommended the interrogation not proceed and brought in medical personnel to evaluate the detainee.” According to these documents, APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose: to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety….

APA is committed to promoting the humane treatment of detainees.  We applaud the efforts of the ACLU to learn the truth about U.S. treatment of detainees. APA will adjudicate any allegation that an APA member has engaged in unethical conduct. If you have information that a psychologist has engaged in torture, I ask that you immediately bring this information to my attention.

As for Behnke’s last contention, i.e., that APA wwould adjudicate any torture allegation against a psychologist, he forgets to mention that most of the information on such behavior is classified. But even more egregious is how APA has treated the formal complaints against one APA member psychologist John Leso. Leso was present for the interrogation of Guantanamo prisoner Mohammed al-Qahtani, and his contribution was documented via the leaked release of al-Qahtani’s interrogation log. Psychologist Trudy Bond, among others, were quick to respond to this and file a formal complaint with APA. She reports on what happened to this complaint in a recent story at Counterpunch. Dr. Bond has given me permission to reproduce the correspondence in the quote below:

The APA leadership was long ago given hard evidence of misconduct by an APA member. A complaint was first filed by another source with your office against APA member Dr. John Leso in August of 2006….

…the Pentagon recently dropped charges against al-Qahtani, with much speculation that this decision was based on the knowledge of the torture he has endured — torture which Dr. Leso enable as a psychologist and member of APA….

Dr. Leso maintains a valid license in the State of New York until 2009, and has been a member in good standing of the American Psychological Association since 1996.

I realize that “justice walks with leaden feet,” (though few realize this statement belongs to Harry Weinberger, attorney for Emma Goldman), but my experience with the APA Office of Ethics in fulfilling the above promises feels more than leaden.

What follows is a synopsis of my attempts to achieve the VERY response YOU PLEDGED in your letter to the ACLU.

April 11, 2007 by Facsimile

To: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Dr. Behnke:

I am filing an ethics complaint against Dr. John F. Leso, a member of APA since 1996. The behavior at issue is participation in cruel, inhumane and degrading treatment as documented in the INTERROGATION LOG of DETAINNEE 063 at Guantanamo.

Sincerely,

Dr. Trudy Bond

April 11, 2007

From: APA Office of Ethics

Dear Dr. Bond:

This is to acknowledge your inquiry received April 11, 2007 indicating your intent to file a complaint against Dr. John F. Leso . . . Once your completed complaint form is received, we will determine whether it is within the time limits for filing . . . We await your response.

April 15, 2007

To: APA Office of Ethics

Fr: Dr. Trudy Bond

Member Against Whom You Are Complaining: Dr. John Franklin Leso. Major John Franklin Leso was licensed by a psychologist by the state of New York and retains license number 013492 until July, 2009. He is currently an active APA member and has been since 1996.

September 4, 2007

To: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Fr: Dr. Trudy Bond

Attached is a copy of the form I submitted to the APA Ethics Committee on April 15, 2007 regarding APA member John Leso. I have received no acknowledgment of or response to said complaint, and therefore am resubmitting this complaint.

December 24, 2007

To: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics, by email

Fr: Dr. Trudy Bond

I filed a second formal complaint against John Leso on September 4, 2007 after i had received no contact form APA regarding the first complaint filed in April of this year. The APA Office of Ethics has not even acknowledged receipt of the complaints I filed.

December 24, 2007

Fr: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Dear Dr. Bond,

The Ethics Office does not respond in email to questions regarding specific ethics matters . . please write or fax the Ethics Office and I will ensure that you receive an expeditious response.

January 3, 2008

To: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Fr: Dr. Trudy Bond

As per your request of 12/24/07, I am resending my letter of that date to you by U.S. Postal Mail asking that you inform me of the status of my ethical complaints against Dr. John Leso.

January 23, 2008

Fr: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Dear Dr. Bond,

Thank you for your letter of January 3 . . . I am out of the country and will respond to your question as soon as I return.

February 6, 2008

Fr: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Dear Dr. Bond,

Our records indicate that on April 11, 2007 you contacted the Ethics Office and indicated a wish to file a complaint against Dr. John Leso . . . Our records indicate that as of October, 2007, the Office had received neither the complaint form nor any additional information from you. As a result, on October 11, the inquiry was closed. . . It appears that you took the complainant packet sent in April . . . and used it to file a complaint against (redacted) . . . the complaint form you submitted in the (redacted) matter has Dr. Leso’s name covered by “white out” . . .To date, we have not received any complaint from you against Dr. Leso.

February 12, 2008

To: Stephen Behnke, APA Director of Ethics

Fr: Dr. Trudy Bond

The complaint against Dr. Leso dated 4/15/07 was never acknowledged by APA. On 9/4/07, I resubmitted the same APA form that I had sent to your office on April 15, 2007. This complaint also was never acknowledged.

February 27, 2008

Fr: Office of Ethics

Dear Dr. Bond:

This is to acknowledge receipt of the completed Ethics Complaint Form and materials for the complaint filed against James F. Leso, PhD….

As you well know, Dr. Behnke, Dr. Leso is not the only psychologist who has had complaints filed against him for involvement in torture, complaints that have not been “adjudicated” by your office. America’s role as a torture nation is part of our national emergency. It’s past time for APA to match words with deeds.

A Failed Policy, or a Policy of Obfuscation

I commend Dr. Bond for her attempt to keep APA on its ethical toes, and for doing the right thing. For my purposes, I wish to concentrate on Dr. Behnke’s contention that “APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose: to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety.” As with the issue of ajudicating complaints, Behkne’s contention is a bald-faced lie.

The relevant section of the Church Report for our purposes is the newly unredacted section on page 281. It concerns interrogation policy and practice in Iraq. The document reads:

Illustrating our previous finding regarding the breakdown of disseminatio, the chart [which is redacted] demonstrates that the use of some of the techniques approved in the September 2003 memorandum continued even until July 2004, despite the fact that many were retracted by the October 2003 memorandum, and some were subsequently prohibited by the May 2004 memorandum…. the relatively widespread use of these techniques supports our finding that the policy documents were not always received or thoroughly understood.

The September 2003 memorandum is the Sanchez memorandum of 9/14/2003, CJTF-7 Interrogation and Counter-Resistance Policy, which includes use of isolation, sleep deprivation, dietary and environmental manipulation, among others. The latter carries this “note”: “Caution: Based on court cases in other countries, some nations may view application of this technique in certain circumstances to be inhumane. Consideration of these views should be given prior to use of this technique.” This memo also included “Yelling, Loud Music, and Light Control: Used to create fear, disorient detainee and prolong capture shock. Volume controlled to prevent injury,” and the use of “stress positions.”

To paraphrase a comment by Steven Miles, re this revelation of “widespread use of these techniques” (and despite statements elsewhere in the report that none of the actors involved noted such abuse — an aspect of this somewhat whitewash of a report that is contradictory)… where were the psychologists when this was going on? The report also notes (pg. 355) that the psychologists did “not function as mental health providers, and one of their core missions is to support interrogations.”

Furthermore, the unredacted portions of the report indicate that “documentation of medical care is not standardized or rigorous…. Separate detainee medical records are not maintained.” A few paragraphs later (pp. 354-255), it’s noted that “According to the Director, Psychological Applications Directorate (U.S. Army Special Operations Command), the only reason for sharing any medical information would be to ensure that detainees are treated in accordance with their medical requirements.” — In other words, psychologists were gatekeepers for indicating who and who couldn’t medically stand the interrogation, such interrogations included, as noted above, “widespread use” of abusive and formally prohibited techniques.

I don’t see how much clearer it can be, given the government is not going to hand us a smoking gun outright. The closest they came to doing that was when the Pentagon released it’s own Inspector General report last year accusing SERE military psychologists, Bruce Jessen and James Mitchell of helping reverse-engineer SERE training into torture instruction to U.S. military/CIA forces abroad. (Katherine Eban at Vanity Fair also wrote a great article on this matter last summer.) Was there any hand-wringing at APA over psychologists being so heavily-implicated in the torture reports? None that was expressed publicly in any case.

If this is not enough, consider the 11/4/03 interrogation at Abu Ghraib, reported in the Church Report, where a detainee “was initially reported to have slumped over during interrogation and then to have died despite attempted medical resuscitation.” Since psychologists were assisting interrogations… where was the psychologist during this interrogation? (Later CID investigation suggested respiration problems due to hooding may have been involved. Hooding is a form of sensory deprivation, as well as inducing fear and disorientation.) — There are a number of other such cases noted.

I believe there is more than enough evidence in the documents provided to cast a very ominous light on the actions of psychologists (and other medical personnel) regarding detainee abuse aka torture. In any case, Behnke’s statement that these documents demonstrate that “APA’s policy of engagement served the intended purpose:  to stop interrogations that cross the bounds of ethical propriety” is a patent falsehood given the bulk of evidence presented.

The APA is on a long, dark road to compromised oblivion. But it does not march alone. There is the recent release of another major evaluation of detainee abuse — this time looking at the role of the FBI at sites where torture took place. This investigatory report by the Department of Justice Inspector General describes how FBI agents were present at CIA torture, protested it, were ignored by their superiors, and even had their attempts at documenting the torture shut down. At the same time, top levels of DoJ, DoD, the FBI, the CIA, Congress, and the Bush Administration did all they could to facilitate the operations of torture and abuse at “war on terror” prisons that practically span the globe (from Guantanamo, to secret prisons in East Europe, to Iraq and Afghanistan, to Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean). Meanwhile, the FBI agents — the “good” ones — filed their protests and went back to their jobs, and the American people were left in the dark.

It seems a majority of the top layer of U.S. intellectual, governmental, and managerial society has lost its mooring entirely. Beholden to a lifestyle and career track that rests upon conquest and imperialistic occupation and control abroad, they either support Bush’s criminal policies, or drown themselves in impotent gestures of protest.

I, thankfully, am done with APA. But their self-serving lies and policy on torture carries on. Where APA sees dollar signs, the rest of us see a growing moral darkness.

Also posted at Invictus, American Torture, and Daily Kos

Thanks for stopping in….

Hang out and chit chat for awhile… and when you’re done

check out some of the excellent offerings on our recent and rec’d list.

O & Please don’t rec the pony party, another will trot up in a few hours.

(^.^)

It occured to me this morning that I’ve seen some new ‘faces’ around…

And that we’ve probably grown some since I joined in mid-September.

So I went on a search and found that the  last three users to join were

1366~kyledeb on May 19, 2008

1365~YippieAgain on May 19, 2008

and 1364~ohmproject on May 19, 2008!!!  

I’d like to extend a Warm Welcome to these and ALL the {{{new dharmenizens}}}

I’m sooo happy you’ve found your way here!

I urge & encourage, no implore & entreat you to open up, join in the conversations going on… We’d like to get to know you (^.^)

^{we’d love to meet all you ‘lurkers’ out there also…don’t think we don’t know you’re there!}

Please ask questions, jump in anywhere if you don’t understand… Pony Parties & News on the Front Page are always open threads… many people stop by these without commenting- this is a Great Place to put questions! Everyone is very friendly & helpful & will be happy to answer you.

We blog here in what I call 3/4 time… I sometimes re-visit the same essay for 3-4 days having long, extended conversations.

So, know that your question WILL be seen, just maybe not immediately (for immediate help see ‘contact us’)

And this leads us to…. be sure to check in your ‘Recent Replies’ (right side of page under ‘menu’ is ‘your comments’ then hit the ‘recent replies’ tab) with regularity! Sometimes you will get a reply to a comment you made yesterday or the day before.

While you are on Your Page be sure to look over ‘Profile’. This is where you can set your preferences… I’m not sure about comment preferences (see ek hornbeck or On The Bus) but under Display Prefs you can set ‘# of recent comments’ and ‘recent essays  diaries’ to 50 each and never have to leave the front page (^.^)

Also on the right hand side is a ‘Series’ link under DharmaDocs. Most of the ongoing features are listed here….it’s an easy way to catch up on your favorite series!

These are my favorite features at docudharma… I’m hoping others will share theirs ::anyone?, c’mon y’all… help me out!::

Welcome! I’m glad you’re Here!!!

O! & there is only one rule….

Be excellent to each other!

Join us over at the EENR Blog for a live blog with IA-4 Democratic candidate Kevin Miskell! At 4pm pacific time Kevin Miskell will be at EENR to answer any questions you have about his run for Congress in Iowa’s 4th district. Hope to see you there!

Kevin Miskell is a fifth generation Iowa farmer from Story County, Iowa. When family farmers were facing an economic crisis under Reagan, Miskell became very involved in his community working to help save family farms. Here’s a snippet from Miskell’s website about his backround as a family farm advocate:

For the past 21 years, he has been active in grassroots politics across the state, promoting sustainable agriculture and fighting to protect the environment. During these past two decades, Kevin has worked with elected officials on both the state and national level on legislation relating to agriculture, rural economic development and renewable energy.

During the past four years, Kevin served as Vice President of Iowa Farmers Union, a grassroots organization that promotes the viability of small family farms and sustainable agriculture.

Since 2003 Kevin has worked on the staff of three presidential campaigns. In 2003, he worked for Senator Bob Graham. When Graham dropped out of the race, Kevin was hired by Senator John Edwards’ campaign to serve as his Midwestern Director of Rural Policy and Outreach and worked again in this capacity in 2008.

More below the fold….

A Fighter for Family Farms

As a family farmer, Kevin Miskell has focused much of his campaign on protecting family farms, promoting sustainability and protecting the environment. Just as we hope for a blue/green alliance that will create a new green economy in America, we also need to help farmers align with the green movement to provide longterm economic stability to small family farms. Here’s a snippet from the Mid-Iowa Newspaper about Kevin’s focus on getting farmers to go green:

“As a member of Farmers Union, I saw small producers get on the power grid,” said the 49-year-old Stanhope resident, who will run in the June 3 Democratic primary for the right to oppose Republican Tom Latham this November in the contest for Iowa’s 4th District Congressional seat.

“Unfortunately, it’s been harder for local folks to get into green energy, though.”

“If you build a wind turbine, the payoff (with tax incentive) is about four years,” he said. “The turbines generate about $275,000 a year. Two or three turbines could be property tax relief … and … a heck of a local industry. These are the oil wells of the future.”

Working for family farms, promoting sustainable agriculture and returning economic benefits to grass roots landowners has been a large part of Miskell’s professional and political life. His resume includes more than two decades of work with lawmakers on the state and federal level.

Miskell on Iraq

Kevin Miskell believes we need to start bringing our troops home from Iraq and end the war. Here’s a snippet from his website:

When elected to Congress, I pledge to bring home America’s troops from Iraq as quickly and safely as possible. The war in Iraq, from its inception, has been poorly planned and poorly executed by George Bush and his administration.

Rather than secure Afghanistan and capture Osama Bin Laden as he so publicly promised, George Bush chose to plunge into an unnecessary war that has cost the United States the lives of over 4,000 American soldiers and more than 60,000 wounded.

Miskell has pledged that his first priority in Congress will be to end the Iraq War. I don’t know about you, but we sure need more Democrats who are 100% committed to ending the occupation in Iraq.

Miskell on the Economy

In the past couple decades Iowa family farmers have been struggling to compete with the corporate agri-business. Here’s a snippet about what Kevin will do for the economy:

I promise, if elected, I will help return America to an era of fiscal responsibility, making sure that the Bush’s tax cuts for the wealthy are repealed and that U.S. tax policy favors the average American and not just those at top.

By cutting taxes in a time of war, Bush has done the unthinkable and driven our economy to the brink of disaster. The best thing for Iowa’s economy would be to get out of this war as quickly and safely as possible and start investing that money in building our state’s infrastructure and doing what Iowa does best.

Here’s a snippet from Miskell about why he’s running for Congress:

I am running for Congress because I want to help create an America where all can share in the prosperity of the American Dream and have equal access to quality education, affordable health care and economic security.

For too long I’ve seen people run for office say one thing to get elected and then abandon those principles once they are in office. Today, America needs leaders who have a track record of working for the good of their neighbors and will keep their word once elected.

For the past twenty-one years I have been active in grassroots politics here in Iowa, fighting to preserve the viability of the family farm, protect the environment, promote sustainable agriculture and expand the rights of all Iowans.

In entering this race I am dedicating myself to representing the values of Middle America, where hard work, integrity and a person’s word are as strong as the land and common sense of community that holds us together.

To learn more about Kevin Miskell you can view his website here. I also came across this great interview Miskell did with the Ames Progressive to give you more insights into what kind of candidate Miskell is.

Get Your Questions Ready!

In just two hours, Kevin will be joining us for a live blog. I hope you’ll come by and ask Kevin any questions about the upcoming June 3rd primary and where he stands on the issues.  

The WeaveMothers were alternately amused and perplexed.  Weaving SpaceTime is a daunting task.  But the die had been cast ThereThen.

Those self-programmable units would have to be the answer.  At least for now, the spot weaving of the tapestry would have to rely on those limited creatures.  If only they didn’t have the bugs that caused them to sometimes go around and around in circles, sometimes get lost in mazes of amazing complexity, and too often fail to cooperate with each other in their common task.

But Uncertainty would always have the upper hand.

And it was quite worrying that they seem to have decided to create rules which were limiting their progress, cutting themselves off from some of the capabilities they had been created to use.

One of the WeaveMothers noticed a spot.  Mostly what might be called its eyes…its visual sensors, if vision was the right concept…were on the whole , but every once in a great while there were units which shown brightly.  Rarer still some of these units came together and produced the newness that expanded the possibilities instead of shrinking them.  

It might pay to keep an eye on this group, if only for the brightness it seems to produce.

My soul has been bared, naked before the Universe.

The web of my cognitive awareness is fragile, ready to crumble at any time.  It only takes a brief stumble, a mental stubbing of the toe, as it were, to collapse the whole structure.  We are ephemeral creatures.

All it takes is a little ice below my feet for me to lose my balance.  For a juggler, that’s a fatal condition.  And it’s not just one ball which will fall.  Interruption of the rhythm will cause almost all of them to tumble down.

Will I really know the difference between diving too deep and falling overboard?

It is also dangerous to blindly mix one’s metaphors.

This is the summer of my sixtieth year, perhaps thrice the number of years I once thought I would survive.  It is a time of reflection on the past and the attempt to imagine a future.  

I have striven to live a life worth living. Imagining that maybe it has even been a life worth relating, I have related it, as best I know how.  There it rests, unstably perched on fading memories.  Much of the support it needs in order to stand lies in the web of connections that have been made with others of my kind.  Those connections are also will-o-the-wisp, ignes fatui floating above the Tapestry of human existence, sometimes vanishing in an instant, sometimes eroding slowly from too much familiarity.

And there will be too many who believe that I am not one of their kind.

Awareness of the Tapestry comes with a price.  If one chooses the brightest colors, the threads can stand out, but the cost is dear.  Energy dwindles.

I burn my candle at both ends,

It will not last the night.

But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends,

It gives a lovely light.

— Edna St. Vincent Millay

Why burn your candle at both ends, when you can attack it in the middle with an acetylene torch.  There’s less aesthetic value, but twice as many people can see the flame.

–Richard Fariña

Who may accuse you of being an exhibitionist and turn their backs.

Will I know when the day comes when deterioration will begin to win out?  Or how far I can go on beyond that point?  Will there ever come a day when doubts about the worthiness of my weaving will not have to be actively repelled?

All I can do is take another step along my path and continue to weave.  That is so much more enjoyable if all our paths are moving in the same general direction.

But what are the odds of that?  

So a color is selected for the thread of finest silk and woven both into the the infrastructure of the group, the structure of the HereNow and the superstructure of SpaceTime.

And the WeaveMothers may watch.

cross posted from The Dream Antilles

It Can’t Happen Here is the title of a 1935 novel by Sinclair Lewis.  It raises the question whether a rightwing, fascist political party can come to power in the US.  It used to be that the very idea was preposterous, unthinkable, impossible.  I’m no longer so sure of that, and acknowledging the frightening possibility has changed my reading of stories about events in other countries in frightening, perplexing, alarming ways.

A short synopsis of It Can’t Happen Here may help:

It features newspaperman Doremus Jessup struggling against the fascist regime of President Berzelius “Buzz” Windrip, who resembles (to some extent) the flamboyantly dictatorial Huey Long of Louisiana and Gerald B. Winrod, the Kansas evangelist whose far-right views earned him the nickname “The Jayhawk Nazi”. It serves as a warning that political movements akin to Nazism can come to power in countries such as the United States when people blindly support their leaders.

Hmmm. This isn’t the only novel with this theme.  The most recent may be Philip Roth’s 2004 novel The Plot Against America:

The novel follows the fortunes of the Roth family during the Lindbergh presidency, as antisemitism becomes more accepted in American life and Jewish-American families like the Roths are persecuted on various levels.

The President Lindbergh of the book is, well, a fascist, a Nazi sympathizer decorated earlier by Nazis.  And his presidency fosters nationalism, isolationism, anti-semitism and racism as if those were aspects of US patriotism.

The New York Times review described the book as “a terrific political novel” as well as “sinister, vivid, dreamlike, preposterous and, at the same time, creepily plausible.”

Preposterous.  Because it couldn’t happen here, right?  Or could it?  I used to believe it couldn’t happen here.  I don’t know what we call the trend of the last 7 years, but we cling desperately to the idea that that couldn’t really happen here, not really, why, our country is constructed in a way that prevents that from happening, right?  I mean, we have the Constitution and a democracy and checks and balances, don’t we?  Hah.

But what if you believe it could happen?  Just assume for the sake of this discussion, that it could.  Let’s assume that what is happening now and has been happening for the past seven years (the Patriot Act, the torture, the repression, the throttling of free speech, the lawlessness, the signing statements, the extraditions, the raids on immigrants, the endless, long list of abuse of power) became even more pronounced and even more widespread and even more blatant. Then all of those stories we read about the excesses of nearby, foreign governments but dismissed as not being able to happen in the US, all of those stories might actually be read as cautionary tales, stories about what might happen in the US unless things changed, unless Constitutional government were restored.

Three stories, all from South America in the 1970’s illustrate this nicely.  They make it clear that horrible injustices that have occurred in other countries aren’t so impossible in the US. And we need to think of them differently.

Item 1. Jacobo Timmerman:

In the decade of the 1960s, Timerman established himself as a popular journalist, and, before the decade had come to a close, he was able to found two different weekly news magazines. Later, from 1971 to 1977, Timerman edited and published the left-leaning daily La Opinión. Under his leadership, this paper publicized news and criticisms of the human rights violations of the Argentine government during the early years of the “Dirty War”. On 15 April 1977, Timerman was arrested by the military. Thereafter, he was subjected to electric shock torture, beatings, and solitary confinement. These experiences were chronicled in his 1981 book , CellPrisoner Without a Name, Cell Without a Number, and a 1983 movie by the same name. /snip

After his release from prison in September 1979, Timerman was forced into exile and sent to Tel Aviv, Israel.

Item 2. Juan Carlos Onetti:

He went on to become one of Latin America’s most distinguished writers, earning Uruguay’s National Prize in literature in 1962. In 1974, he and some of his colleagues were imprisoned by the military dictatorship. Their crime: as members of the jury, they had chosen Nelson Marra’s short story El guardaespaldas (i.e. “The bodyguard”) as the winner of Marcha’s annual literary contest. Due to a series of misunderstandings (and the need to fill some space in the following day’s edition), El guardaespaldas was published in Marcha, although it had been widely agreed among them that they shouldn’t and wouldn’t do so, knowing this would be the perfect excuse for the military to intervene Marcha, considering the subject of the story (the interior monologue of a top-rank military officer who recounts his murders and atrocious behavior, much as it was happening with the functioning regime).

Onetti left his native country (and his much-loved city of Montevideo) after being imprisoned for 6 months in Colonia Etchepare, a mental institution. A long list of world-famous writers-including Gabriel García Márquez, Mario Vargas Llosa and Mario Benedetti-signed open letters addressed to the military government of Uruguay, which was unaware of the talented (and completely harmless) writer it had imprisoned and humiliated.

As soon as he was released, Onetti fled to Spain with his wife, violin player Dorotea Mühr.

Item 3. Charles Horman:

In 1972, he settled temporarily in Chile to work as a freelance writer. On September 17, 1973, six days after the US-backed military takeover, Horman was seized by Chilean soldiers and taken to the National Stadium in Santiago, which had been turned by the military into an ad hoc concentration camp, where prisoners were interrogated, tortured and executed. The whereabouts of Horman’s body were presumably undetermined, at least according to the Americans, for about a month following his death, although it was later determined that, after his execution, Horman’s body was buried inside a wall in the national stadium. It later turned up in a morgue in the Chilean capital.

If you read these three items with the idea that Argentina, Uruguay, and Chile aren’t the US and these things just couldn’t happen here, they are far away, exotic but commonplace examples of banana republic injustice.  They feel like scary fiction, but fiction nonetheless.

But if you assume instead that ’70’s South America isn’t really all that very much different from the present US, or, if you insist, from where the US is headed, the stories become chilling, frightening, and worrisome in a new way.  They smell like oppression, abuse, repression, and loss of human rights.  Are we protected from these things or not?  Are we safe?  Are we free?  

This is just another reason why we simply cannot afford to continue the current trend in this country.  And it’s a reason why we have to take the present threats from Bushco and its allies seriously.  And it’s a reason why we need jealously and vigorously to protect our civil rights.

( – promoted by buhdydharma )

My stepfather’s brother died with other Marines on the beach at Guadacanal during World War II.

My best high school friend was killed in the early days of the Vietnam War.

These men will be honored at next Monday’s Memorial Day ceremonies along with nearly a million of their soldier, sailor, marine, coast guard and air force compatriots who gave their lives in military service. No distinction is made between the hundreds of thousands who died fighting in wars most Americans would consider righteous and the hundreds of thousands who were killed in the furtherance of bad causes or died in vain because their criminal or reckless leaders sent them into harm’s way for greed, stupidity or empire. Those who fought in gray uniforms in a war of secession are given the same reverence, the same moments of silence, the same commemoration of sacrifice as those who wore blue into battle.

It doesn’t matter whether they were white boys from the First Tennessee Infantry Regiment who fell in the land-grabbing war with Mexico in 1847, or black soldiers of the 93rd Infantry Division fighting Germans in the war to end all wars, or Japanese-Americans of the 442nd Regimental Combat Team slugging their way through Italy while their relatives lived incarcerated in camps back home.

It doesn’t matter whether their name was Hernández, or Hansen, or Hashimoto. Nor whether they caught enemy shrapnel or a bullet from friendly fire. Nor whether they were drafted or volunteered. Nor whether they died fighting for liberty more than 200 years ago at Bunker Hill or crushing it more than 100 years ago in the boondocks of the Philippines. On Memorial Day all American warriors who lost their lives are honored because they did lose their lives. They live on in our hearts and on paper with their deaths recorded in obituaries (similar to https://www.genealogybank.com/explore/obituaries/all/usa/pennsylvania/philadelphia/philadelphia-inquirer) by their families.

However, there is one exception.

My great-great-great-great-great uncle was killed by U.S. soldiers during the Second Seminole War. Other distant relatives were killed during the Third Seminole War. Killed for trying to hold onto freedom, land, the right to self-determination.

Whether they killed warriors and women on the banks of the Pease River in Texas, the Washita River in Kansas, Sand Creek in Colorado, or Wounded Knee Creek in South Dakota; whether they fought Shawnee in Indiana, Asakiwaki in Wisconsin, Lakota and Cheyenne in Montana, Chiricahua in Arizona, Nez Perce in Idaho or Modocs in California, the men in blue who were killed in the Indian Wars are among those who will be honored Monday.

But the thousands of warriors they killed – the ancestors of us original Americans – aren’t counted for the ultimately futile but unhesitating sacrifice they made for the freedom of their people. On Memorial Day, they are invisible. Monuments to the Rebel dead can be found in practically every town of the Confederacy. Memorials to Indian resistance are next to non-existent.  

Attempts have been made to correct this. In 2002, the 1909 memorial on the Denver Capitol grounds that honored the 22 soldiers killed as they and their compatriots massacred the southern Arapaho and Cheyenne at Sand Creek got a new plaque to replace the one calling that slaughter a Civil War victory for the Union. Seventeen years ago, the Custer Battlefield National Monument was renamed Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument, and now, intermixed with the white marble 7th Cavalry gravestones are a double handful of red marble gravestones for fallen Indian warriors. Steps in the right direction. But not nearly enough.

Scores of sites throughout America could display memorial statues commemorating events with succinct plaques: From this site in 17– or 18–, the Anishinaabe (or Comanche, or Alibamu) were removed to reservations in ——- after 50 (or 120, or 350) of their number were killed in a surprise attack by the U.S. soldiers, some of whom cut off breasts or scrota for use as trophies and tobacco pouches. Their lands were turned over to settlers, miners and railroad builders and the city/town of —— was built on their burial grounds.

Monday, when the nation’s war dead are remembered, when we are supposed to put aside political and ethnic divisions for a few moments of introspection, many of our politicians still won’t take a break from the lies – past and current lies – for which too many men and women went prematurely into the ground. Monday, for the eighth time and final time, Mister Bush will be stealing the rubric of patriotism, milking it for all the tears he can. Monday, we will hear from him and many another politician plenty about liberty, freedom and sacrifice associated with American wars, but nothing about the plunder, rapine and imperial machinations associated with some of those wars, the Mexican War, the Philippines War, the Iraq War, and, of course, the Indian Wars.

Let me be crystal clear. I’m for moving ahead, for transcendence, Indians and non-Indians alike. We live in the 21st Century, and people alive now bear no responsibility and should carry no guilt for what was done more than a century or two ago.

But Monday is Memorial Day, memory day, and, just as we do not forget the men who froze at Valley Forge or took bullets at Fort Wagner or were blown up at Khe Sanh, there is no excuse for the nation to retreat into convenient amnesia and forget the deaths of those who resisted the theft and genocide led by leaders masquerading as divinely inspired messengers of freedom in the 18th and 19th centuries.

Until the nation remembers all its dead warriors, you’ll pardon me if my Memorial Day reverence is tempered with rage.

Bayes’ theorem is useful in evaluating the result of drug tests. Suppose a certain drug test is 99% sensitive and 99% specific, that is, the test will correctly identify a drug user as testing positive 99% of the time, and will correctly identify a non-user as testing negative 99% of the time. This would seem to be a relatively accurate test, but Bayes’ theorem will reveal a potential flaw. Let’s assume a corporation decides to test its employees for opium use, and 0.5% of the employees use the drug. We want to know the probability that, given a positive drug test, an employee is actually a drug user. Let “D” be the event of being a drug user and “N” indicate being a non-user. Let “+” be the event of a positive drug test. We need to know the following:

   * P(D), or the probability that the employee is a drug user, regardless of any other information. This is 0.005, since 0.5% of the employees are drug users. This is the prior probability of D.

   * P(N), or the probability that the employee is not a drug user. This is 1 ? P(D), or 0.995.

   * P(+|D), or the probability that the test is positive, given that the employee is a drug user. This is 0.99, since the test is 99% accurate.

   * P(+|N), or the probability that the test is positive, given that the employee is not a drug user. This is 0.01, since the test will produce a false positive for 1% of non-users.

   * P(+), or the probability of a positive test event, regardless of other information. This is 0.0149 or 1.49%, which is found by adding the probability that the test will produce a true positive result in the event of drug use (= 99% x 0.5% = 0.495%) plus the probability that the test will produce a false positive in the event of non-drug use (= 1% x 99.5% = 0.995%). This is the prior probability of +.

Given this information, we can compute the posterior probability P(D|+) of an employee who tested positive actually being a drug user:

P(D|+)  = (0.99 x 0.005)/(0.99 x 0.005)+(0.01 x 0.005)

P(D|+)  = 0.3322

Despite the high accuracy of the test, the probability that an employee who tested positive actually did use drugs is only about 33%, so it is actually more likely that the employee is not a drug user. The rarer the condition for which we are testing, the greater the percentage of positive tests that will be false positives.

The purpose of this exercise was to show that even when common sense suggests that a test with high accuracy should have highly accurate results, the underlying probability of a positive result is the most important factor in getting an accurate result.  In simple terms, we ought to be a lot less confident that prosecutors are charging the correct person, that drug testing works, or that statistics are showing us what we think they are.  Highly unlikely events remain highly unlikely even when we have very accurate tests which indicate they are taking place.