it’s about time……don’t know how i missed this one

By Shankar Vedantam

Washington Post Staff Writer
Monday, August 20, 2007

SAN FRANCISCO, Aug. 19 — The American Psychological Association ruled Sunday that psychologists can no longer be associated with several interrogation techniques that have been used against terrorism detainees at U.S. facilities because the methods are immoral, psychologically damaging and counterproductive in eliciting useful information.Psychologists who witness interrogators using mock executions, simulated drowning, sexual and religious humiliation, stress positions or sleep deprivation are required to intervene to stop such abuse, to report the activities to superiors and to report the involvement of any other psychologists in such activities to the association. It could then strip those professionals of their membership.

The move by the APA, the nation’s largest association of behavioral experts, is a rebuke of the Bush administration’s anti-terrorism policies. Many of the techniques deemed unacceptable have been widely reported to be used at military facilities at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, as well as in Iraq and at various CIA detention centers.But it also has practical effects. Psychologists who have their membership revoked can lose their license, since many state licensing boards require psychologists to be in good standing with the national association.Also ruled out of bounds are the exploitation of prisoners’ phobias, the use of mind-altering drugs, hooding, forced nakedness, the use of dogs to frighten detainees, exposing prisoners to extreme heat and cold, physical assault and threatening the use of such techniques against a prisoner or a prisoner’s family.Several psychologists declared that these methods are not only physically and psychologically damaging to both inmates and captors but also counterproductive for obtaining useful intelligence. Data from several wars and from a range of criminal justice settings show that once prisoners start to fear for their lives and safety, they start trying to guess what their captors want to hear, and the resulting bad information is often worse than having no information at all, several psychologists said.The move follows similar decisions by other professional associations, such as the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association. But psychologists play an unusual role in that they widely serve both in a clinical role — involving the treatment of sick prisoners — and as researchers of human behavior. The decision came after days of heated protests at the 115th annual meeting of the APA. Protesters, some wearing orange jumpsuits, urged the experts to disassociate themselves entirely from the Bush administration’s detention facilities.The association decided against a blanket measure that would have kept psychologists from working in interrogation facilities altogether. Many critics of that measure, including several government experts, said that psychologists play an essential role in these settings, both in terms of safeguarding detainees and in helping to debunk the belief that coercion and humiliation are effective interrogation tactics.“If we lose psychologists from these facilities, people are going to die,” said U.S. Army Col. Larry James, chief of the department of psychology at the Tripler Army Medical Center in Honolulu, just before the APA’s Council of Representatives took a vote.There were several references to the hit television show “24″ in the psychologists’ debate. It routinely depicts abusive techniques used to elicit information from prisoners, usually in “ticking time bomb” scenarios.“I find the interrogation scenes in the television show ‘24′ repulsive, absurd and even idiotic,” said Katherine Sherwood, a civilian interrogator for the Department of Defense who spoke at the convention. “If I am talking to a bombmaker, I am not trying to get him to tell me he is a bombmaker. I want him to tell me what students he trained, what their nationalities are, what materials he used and who was funding the project.”Such Hollywood scenarios, Sherwood said, fail to recognize that the central utility of interrogations is in building a lattice of interconnections that can inform military and civilian policymakers.“Interrogations are about gathering breadth or depth of information,” Sherwood said. “It is not about getting to a single moment of a confession.”Several other experts at the psychologists’ convention, including Stephen Behnke, director of the APA’s ethics office, said successful interrogations are almost always about building a relationship with a prisoner — a relationship that is impossible to build when the prisoner is being subjected to stress, humiliation or abuse.Interrogation policies at U.S. detention facilities went astray when officials decided to apply techniques developed to train U.S. troops to deal with torture if they were captured, said Air Force Reserve Col. Steven Kleinman.Such techniques, developed under a military program known as SERE (Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape), were meant to toughen soldiers against abuse. The techniques were never designed to help interrogators elicit useful information from prisoners, added Eric Anders, a psychoanalyst at the convention who is a graduate of the SERE program.Neil Altman, a clinical psychologist at New York University, who had pushed to get psychologists out of detention facilities altogether, praised the APA for laying out what was prohibited. But he said the measure still allows psychologists to remain in facilities that are inherently “cruel, inhumane and degrading.”Leonard S. Rubenstein, executive director of the group Physicians for Human Rights, said the psychologists had fooled themselves into thinking their continued presence at detention facilities would make a difference when they were actually playing only a support role.“It is unfortunate the APA did not recognize you cannot practice ethical psychology in interrogation settings in the context of pervasive violation of human rights,” he said.

u s spending patterns

The Warfare State is Part of Us

bin ladin attacked america to seek a fight on muslim soil

ABC TV’s Lateline presenter Tony Jones interviewed Mr Bari Atwan on the program last night. 

Osama bin Laden and his people are always glorifying that Muslim past, early Islamic history. That’s why they have the names of those great conquerors in that part of the world.

He wanted to imitate the Prophet Mohammed. They were humble, simple, and living a basic, austere way of life. Maybe this is the origin of his charisma. That’s why the people around him, they adore him, they consider him something different. He can be a Buddha or a violent Buddha, the one who actually gave up everything, wealth and money, to live this basic life. Who could be also Ghandi, but again a violent Ghandi, who actually distributed his wealth to the poor people. That’s why they actually like him. That’s why they believe in him.

And he rejected a lot of offers from his country, Saudi Arabia, to go back. He told me, he rejected more than $450 million in order to go back and live there and continue his business activities. When his followers hear these kind of stories, they consider him as a saint, as somebody, a monk, a pope or someone like that. So that’s why he’s actually very influential among certain frustrated young people in the Muslim world.

Osama bin Laden told Abdul Bari Atwan he wanted to “bring the Americans into a fight on Muslim soil”. (Reuters)

(edited portion) …the September 11, 2001 attacks were to draw America to the Middle East. It appears that Al Qaeda’s strategists actually anticipated the invasion of Iraq, and you write that they contacted bin Laden and actually got hundreds of Al Qaeda operatives onto the ground before the invasion to start preparing for the insurgency.

(when)..the Americans invaded Iraq, Al Qaeda was prepared for that. Immediately, they sent hundreds of people through the Syrian border, through the Turkish border, Iranian border, to go and set up bases in Iraq. Iraq is a safe haven for Al Qaeda because it has about 50 million pieces of arms. It has about five million tonnes of ammunition left by Saddam Hussein regimes and also the Sunni community, which was deposed from power by the American invasion, and they were actually very, very frustrated, very humiliated. So it was the best environment for Al Qaeda to set up its bases there.

That’s what we are seeing now. Al Qaeda is very strong, Al Qaeda is now expanding. We used to have one Al Qaeda in Tora Bora and Afghanistan, now it is like a monster, it is like Kentucky Fried Chickens, actually, opening branches everywhere in the world. We have Al Qaeda in Afghanistan, which is regrouping again; Al Qaeda in Iraq, which is very active; Al Qaeda in Saudi Arabia, which managed to destabilise the country there; Al Qaeda in Europe, and we saw what happened in Madrid in London; Al Qaeda in North Africa now, which is very, very active. I think this war against Iraq gave Al Qaeda a huge opportunity to expand, to recruit more people under its fold.

michael o hanlon gets an e-z pass: the surge as a first step to relocation and ethnic cleansing-n.y. times

From the New York Times:

The number of Iraqis fleeing their homes has soared since the American troop increase began in February, according to data from two humanitarian groups, accelerating the partition of the country into sectarian enclaves…The effect of this vast migration is to drain religiously mixed areas in the center of Iraq, sending Shiite refugees toward the overwhelmingly Shiite areas to the south and Sunnis toward majority Sunni regions to the west and north.

It is now obvious that one impetus behind the “surge” was to accelerate the “ethnic cleansing” of Iraq. Given the manifest failure to establish a strong central government to serve as a client state, the conquerors now find it easier to deal with separate ethnic enclaves, which can police themselves, shake out their own internal conflicts (however bloodily) and thus establish some kind of solid leadership that can cut deals and guarantee investments. Most of the measures taken during the “surge” seem aimed precisely at ethnic cleansing: the increased support of the Iraqi government security forces — which are largely Shiite militias — has been matched with what some see as the lunatic policy of arming Sunni militias.

The latter is indeed a lunatic policy — if your aim is to establish security and political rapprochement in Iraq. And although the leaders of the United States are indeed a gang of depraved moral idiots, they are not lunatics. Even they could see the folly of such a course — again, if the aim was actually security and political cohesion. Thus one can only conclude that this is not their aim, that their aim is indeed to exacerbate ethnic conflict, to foment more violence, in what amounts to a stealth operation of ethnic cleansing.

This serves two main purposes: first, as noted above, it will help shake the country out, eventually, into more manageable enclaves — each one stronger and more cohesive than the current government (which is largely a fictional notion at this point), yet weaker, and more malleable, than any stable and legitimate central government would be. And since the only kind of central government that could achieve stability and legitimacy in the eyes of all Iraqis would be one which was genuinely sovereign, truly independent from American domination, we will never see such a government in Baghdad as long as U.S. troops are in Iraq.

Which brings us to the second purpose of the “surge’s” arming of sectarian gangs: to maintain a level of violence and chaos that would “justify” the continuing presence of American troops in Iraq. A permanent military presence is one of the overriding goals of the invasion, set down long before the war, before 9/11, even before the loser Bush was given the presidency by five Supreme Court justices (two of whom had family members working for the Bush operation). Therefore, to the Bushists, any measure is justified that will keep American troops in Iraq — including fomenting bloody sectarian conflict and carrying out ethnic cleansing.

This in turn is tied to another of the chief war aims: the “oil law” that will open Iraq’s sumptuous resources to predatory Western investors. This can only be can only be guaranteed by the presence of American troops, backing up some compliant puppet state or “semi-autonomous enclave.” Again, a genuinely sovereign, truly independent government would never give away the nation’s patrimony to Bush and Cheney’s oil baron cronies and their European comrades.

And so the strategy behind the “surge” becomes clear: A united, independent Iraq cannot be allowed to exist, because such a state would not permit a permanent American military presence nor sign away the nation’s oil wealth. Therefore, Iraq must be torn apart — by sectarian strife, ethnic cleansing, terrorism and “counterinsurgency” warfare. And violence must continue until this shake-out is completed, in order to justify the continuing American presence.

While Bush pursues ethnic cleansing by stealth in Iraq — or rather, pursues it quite openly, but just doesn’t call it ethnic cleansing — the Democrats and their outriders, the “liberal hawks” (or “humanitarian interventionists” or “Wilsonian idealists” or whatever tag they’re wearing these days) are championing the policy in the public sphere. The idea of a three-way split of Iraq between Sunnis, Shias and Kurds has long been mooted in some quarters — Joe Biden and “liberal” intellectuals like Leslie Gelb and Peter Galbraith were early enthusiasts — and it is now gaining force within the foreign policy “clerisy” that Glenn Greenwald and Arthur Silber have been dissecting in recent days. Firedoglake points us to the incisive commentaries of Reidar Visser, “an actual expert on the regional aspects of Iraq and its history,” who has lately been debunking the deeply ignorant and murderously arrogant “partition” proposals of Galbraith and others.

Visser takes aim at one of the most hideous of these proposals: “The Case for Soft Partition in Iraq,” by respected “scholars” Michael O’Hanlon (see A Tiny Revolution for more on this fine mind of our time) and Edward Joseph. When I first read of these gentlemen’s work, I thought it must surely be a parody, a take-off on the deadly serious, genocidal fantasies of Philip Atkinson, who, on a website hardwired to the rightwing power grid of Frank Gaffney, James Woolsey and Dick Cheney, called for Bush to nuke Iraq, repopulate it with Americans and declare himself President-for-Life. The O-Hanlon-Joseph piece for the highly respectable Brookings Institution partakes of that same kind of murderous fantasy. As Visser notes:

…using cool academic language, the authors review the nuts and bolts of relocating somewhere between 2 and 5 million Iraqis in order to create new ethnic federal entities. Snippets from this part of the report probably speak best for themselves: “we advocate where possible dividing major cities along natural boundaries” (p. 16); “on the actual day of the relocation operation, Iraqi and US-led coalition forces would deploy in sufficient numbers to look for snipers, cover the flanks of the civilian convoys, inspect suspicious vehicles for explosives and conduct similar tasks” (p. 17); and finally, on p. 24, “this [internal border] control system would place some burdens on Iraq’s internal trade and other aspects of its economy. It would complicate the efforts of individuals to cross from one region to another to visit family and friends. For the most part these burdens would be bearable. For individuals or businesses that need to make frequent crossings across Iraq’s new internal borders, or those willing to pay for the privilege, an EZ pass system [sic] might be developed to expedite movements for those with important and regular business to conduct.”

“On the actual day of the relocation operation….” Try to imagine such a day, when millions of Iraqis are uprooted and forced to move to other areas, all under guard by “Iraqi and US-led coalition forces.” Actually it’s not that hard to imagine, for we have seen it before: in faded photographs and newsreel footage and films like “The Sorrow and the Pity,” “Shoah,” and “Schindler’s List.” Less familiar in the popular imagination but perhaps even more apposite are the “relocations” of ethnic populations carried out by Josef Stalin, when whole peoples, such as the Chechens, were uprooted and transported by force to other regions. Or we could of course look closer to home, at the “Trail of Tears,” the deadly removal of the Cherokee from their homelands to concentration camps in Oklahoma.

These kinds of scenes are precisely what the clean-limbed O’Hanlon and his partner envisage for Iraq, followed by a life ensnared by checkpoints and passes and internal border controls. It may sound harsh, brutal and inhuman, but not to worry: “For the most part these burdens would be bearable.”
I have a suggestion for Mr. O’Hanlon. I propose that he subject himself to such a regimen, then come back and tell just us how “bearable” it is. He doesn’t even have to move five million Iraqis under armed guard to participate in this experiment: he can go to Palestine right now, where the people already live under his kind of “soft partition.” Let him try it on for himself, just for a few months — not the lifelong sentence he proposes for the Iraqis. We can even give him an “EZ Pass” to expedite any “important business” he needs to do.

This is what we’ve come to — or perhaps, harking back to the Trail of Tears, this is where we came in. Ignorant, arrogant, cowardly elites proposing — and in Bush’s case, inflicting — vast human suffering on innocent people, driving them from their homes, terrorizing them, killing them. And all of this done for no other reason but to enhance the coddled elite’s power, privilege and pleasures.