Author's posts
Nov 18 2008
The Forgotten Men: New UC Report on “Guantanamo and its Aftermath”
Consider this a companion piece to Compound F’s excellent essay, Justice After Bush: Prosecuting an Outlaw Administration.
Last summer, Physicians for Human Rights and Human Rights First released Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of Torture by the U.S.. The study looked at medical and psychological evidence of the costs of torture by eleven men who endured such abuse by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Guantánamo Bay.
Now, University of California, Berkeley’s Human Rights Center, in conjunction with the International Human Rights Law Clinic and Center for Constitutional Rights, has released a report on the medical and psychological condition of 62 detainees released over the years from Guantanamo. According to a press release by the university:
Nov 12 2008
APA Advisory Group Examines New Interrogations Policy
This weekend, a little-known group will meet in Washington, D.C. It’s the American Psychological Association’s Presidential Advisory Group on the Implementation of the Petition Resolution. The petition resolution, for those who may not have known or remembered, was the fruit of a successful campaign by anti-torture activists within APA to change that organization’s policy of allowing psychologists to participate in interrogations at “war on terror” sites like Guantanamo or Baghram, which had been implicated in use of torture and human rights violations, like the use of indefinite detentions.
APA officialdom had long argued that the presence of psychologists protected the prisoners from abuse. Unfortunately for them, a wealth of documentation proved that in fact psychologists had been implicated in the organization and implementation of U.S. torture.
Nov 03 2008
After the Election: a Preview
Glenn Greenwald at Salon.com has succinctly made the point about the pending Obama victory, saving me the trouble of writing it out in my own strained syntax:
It certainly seems, by all appearances, that Barack Obama and Joe Biden will win on Tuesday (though anything can happen, don’t assume anything, etc. etc.). For reasons I’ve explained many times before, I consider that to be a good and important outcome (principally due to the need to excise the Right from power for as long as possible). But the virtually complete absence from the presidential campaign of any issues pertaining to the executive power abuses of the last eight years — illegal eavesdropping, torture, rendition, due-process-less detentions, the abolition of habeas corpus, extreme and unprecedented secrecy, general executive lawlessness — reflects how much further work and effort will be required to make progress on these issues no matter what happens on Tuesday.
It doesn’t help that Obama has already voted with the national security fetishists on FISA expanded wiretapping.
Oct 27 2008
“I lived for art, I lived for love”
Oct 27 2008
“I lived for art, I lived for love”
Oct 27 2008
Unit 731: Biological Warfare & Human Medical Experimentation
The story of United States research into and use of biological weapons remains a huge blank spot in the known history of this country. There have been attempts to document this history, but much remains classified or has been destroyed. The use of biological weapons dovetails with U.S. research into drugs and mind control against prisoners, as the revelations about MKULTRA or the Edgewood Arsenal experiments make clear (see this fascinating story by Michael Ignatieff in the New York Times Magazine, April 2001).
This posting is the first in a series I hope to publish over time looking at the controversial question of U.S. use of biological weapons, and its links to MKULTRA and other covert CIA or military programs. It examines the origins of the U.S. program in biological weapons research, as it grew out of the ashes of the horrific program in the same, started by the Japanese Imperial government in the 1930s. It is best known by its bureaucratic moniker: Unit 731.
Oct 22 2008
“Interrogation Psychologists” and the Allure of “National Security Psychology”
Martha Davis Ph.D., a Clinical Psychologist and a Visiting Scholar at John Jay College of Criminal Justice in New York City, has produced an important new documentary, Interrogation Psychologists: The Making of a Professional Crisis”. The film premiered at a conference entitled “The Interrogation and Torture Controversy: Crisis in Psychology,” held at the John Jay College of Criminal Justice, Center on Terrorism in New York City on September 12, 2008.
Dr. Davis describes the documentary:
“In 2005 the American Psychological Association endorsed the participation of military psychologists in detainee interrogations. This policy incited a firestorm of protest within the profession and around the world, but APA officials held fast, contending that the involvement of psychologists insured that interrogations were safe, ethical and effective. With interviews of experts and documentation of communications between APA and government officials, “Interrogation Psychologists” traces the origins of the policy and why the APA risked massive defections for it. The search leads to the emerging field of national security psychology, which has far-reaching implications for intelligence gathering operations and U.S. treatment of prisoners of war.”
Oct 15 2008
Secret Memos Show White House Approved CIA Torture
Joby Warrick at The Washington Post has an article today confirming what many of us have suspected for some time: the CIA asked for and received written approval for its “enhanced interrogation” program, which notoriously includes the use of techniques like waterboarding. Condoleezza Rice confirmed in hearings before the Senate Armed Services Committee last month that she and other White House “Principals” had been briefed on the CIA’s torture program in early 2002. (ABC News had broken the story first, last spring.)
According to Washington Post article today, CIA director George Tenet pushed for the written confirmations of support, wary of legal entanglements for CIA personnel involved in the abusive interrogation program. He first asked and received the CIA’s get-out-of-jail card in June 2003, and then again after the Abu Ghraib story broke in mid-2004.
Oct 12 2008
Major New Torture Archive Gives 1st Peek at SERE SOP
The National Security Archive and Washington Media Associates have introduced a major new research resource, as part of their new website, TorturingDemocracy.org. The Torture Archive, which appears at the site along with timelines related to torture, a discussion guide, various interviews, and the documentary, “Torturing Democracy” itself, is described as “the online institutional memory for essential evidence on torture.”
Drawing upon work already done by the ACLU, Center for Constitutional Rights, the Senate Armed Services Committee (SASC), and various journalists, the Archive intends to “bring together all these materials in digital formats, organize and catalog them for maximum utility and access, and publish them online in multiple packages including a comprehensive searchable database.” NSA/WMA describe their intentions thusly:
Oct 11 2008
Debut Today: New Website Streams Torture Documentary
From the press release from the people who are bringing us the new documentary, Torturing Democracy:
Award-winning producer Sherry Jones presents a comprehensive documentary – more than 18 months in the making – that examines America’s detention and interrogation practices in the “war on terror” in Torturing Democracy, premiering Thursday, October 16 at 9 p.m. on Thirteen/WNET.
Oct 07 2008
A Thing of Beauty in a Barbarous Time
Barbarus hic ego sum, quia non intelligor illis. – Ovid
With the economy imploding, and the wars, and crimes, and torture, and impotent political posturing — even as the pockets of the people are picked on a daily basis — there is a time, there must be a time for beauty, for a time apart the madness. We must remember what our humanity is, and why we even bother with the onus of civilization, with its exploitation and its barbarism.
Jean-Jacques Rousseau, in his famous essay, “Discourse on the Arts and Sciences,” provocatively asked whether it wasn’t such condolences that bound us ever tighter to the chains of oppression:
Oct 03 2008
Big Victory: APA Informs Bush — No Psychologists at Military Interrogations
Readers of this blog know that dissident psychologists, along with human rights and anti-torture organizations and individuals have been working for years now to get the American Psychological Association to change its policy of supporting the use of psychologists in interrogations at Guantanamo, CIA black-site prisons, and other governmental sites involved in Bush’s Global War on Terror.
Last month, a referendum that called for banning such participation was passed by a large majority of voting APA members. At first, APA bureaucrats mumbled something about instituting this new policy come August 2009! But large scale protest by the membership seems to have caused them to back down, and today, APA has released a letter to George W. Bush informing the head of the U.S. executive branch and commander-in-chief of U.S. armed forces of the new change in APA policy.