The Rag Blog

07/21/07 “ICH” — – -It’s about time Americans faced the truth.

A Marine not only convicted of conspiring to commit kidnapping, larceny, and making false statements; but the murder – MURDER – of an innocent Iraqi man, was given his sentence. He is to receive a reduction in rank and a bad conduct discharge.

THIS is what America has become.

It is now considered “bad conduct” to murder an unarmed man, knowingly return to the scene to fabricate the appearance of self-defense and hide the facts after the fact.

Murdering an innocent Iraqi is now considered “Bad Conduct.”

In 2004 my husband, a ten-year US Army veteran, made a conscious decision to no longer participate in war – he spoke openly of the bad conduct of his commanders in giving orders to soldiers in his unit which not only jeopardized the lives of innocent Iraqis, and children, but also those of the soldiers he served with.

For his decision to no longer be part of the destruction, wanton killing, and unjust, immoral action this war has shown itself to be, my husband was accused of being a deserter, faced trumped up, fabricated charges of intentionally missing his unit’s movement, and when the first court-martial attempt failed, was handed additional trumped up charges of larceny for combat pay his command erroneously placed in his paycheck. During a second court-martial attempt he was found guilty of missing movement or not getting on a plane and was sentenced to 15 months in prison, loss of all pay, reduction in rank and a dishonorable discharge.

A veteran with ten years of honorable service, who took a stand to no longer participate in an action in which murdering innocents is acceptable is now considered “Dishonorable.”

How low do you intend to go, America?

How far are you going to let your values dip before you stop the slide?

We don’t need to see the documents “executive privilege” is denying us the right to see. Their content is evident in the actions of our military courts – Justice in America no longer has a conscience, and the travesty continues as Americans sleep through the reality of what it is they are about to lose.

The United States Congress spent an entire night – wasted an entire night – in a public display of ridiculous bantering over a war which has now caused the deaths of almost 4000 US military personnel and hundreds of thousands of innocent civilians – CHILDREN are dying every day in Iraq because of what this country has allowed to happen, and our Congress has the foresight to remember to place cots in the Senate chambers in case one of the illustrious elite might grow weary of their repetitious “pillow talk” and need a rest.

I am weary of the talk – the Iraqis are weary of the talk – and I know for a fact that American soldiers are weary of the talk.

There are some who, while wearing our nation’s uniform, have committed horrendous crimes in this war, and in a great many instances have received little more than a slap on the hand for their actions. Hundreds of thousands more soldiers have served honorably under the most horrendous conditions, fighting against their instincts for survival to maintain morality in their actions in the most difficult circumstances. They deserve better than to see those who cannot control themselves face so little consequence for their lack of character.

The administration that sent our military to war has become nothing more than a dictatorship in emperor’s clothing and our congress is clearly displaying how little backbone they have when it comes to defending the truth in the hallowed halls within which our Constitution is supposed to still matter.

The American people seem to live in a stupor as our soldiers continue to be sent to war – our congress can’t seem to find it in themselves to get up off their cots and realize that our military needs a rest too, as do the Iraqi citizens who have seen their country devastated beyond recognition by the maniacal whims of an administration that is lost in its love for self-aggrandizement and its need for public recognition regardless of whether their behavior is even remotely recognizable as human.

Where is America’s Conscience?

This country has become such a nation of followers, addicted to letting someone, anyone else make their decisions for them as long as they can continue on in their hazy stupor, wrapped in the illusion of living a celebrated life, carefree and requiring no responsibility for their actions.

Why is this administration still allowed a shred of credibility?

Why are we still acknowledging any of the members of our congress as being capable of representing any truth in their actions?

The truth is that none of our government officials are willing to admit to a mistake. None of our government officials are willing to take a stand to acknowledge that their role in sending our soldiers to war was instrumental in the greatest mistake imaginable. Our government officials continue to hope that a “surge and a prayer” will bring victory to the glittery false promises they so boldly made as they sought to assure a fearful nation to put their trust in leaders who have yet to come to terms with the true meaning of responsibility; and the war drags on as more soldiers die and more families face their loss in the heart of a nation whose beat yields a very hollow sound.

Our soldiers and their families deserve better and it is past time for American citizens to take a stand to defend the laws they have expected our soldiers to fight for in their name.

Our government leadership stands with their hands over their hearts crying crocodile tears as they tell story after story of the “brave soldiers and families” who continue to sacrifice so greatly in this country’s name – doing so with all the feeling of the new robot baby introduced as the latest “must have toy” soon to be all the rage in every American household.

Our military families stand with their hands empty and their hearts heavy as they struggle to make it through a memorial service trying to find meaning in the cause for which their loved one died –grasping at believing the words of the politicians when they are told this sacrifice has been worth the loss, simply because they don’t want to believe they lost their loved one for nothing.

America doesn’t know their loss – America knows talk. America knows drama. America knows politics.

America hasn’t the first clue about loss – and so Americans continue to lose, and soldiers continue to die while the games of politicians are acted out on the nightly news in dramatic displays of understanding with the depth of a two inch mud puddle.

Americans haven’t the first idea what it means to sacrifice – and Americans don’t care whether there was a reason for our soldiers to die or not, as long as they are not the ones who must look in the mirror and face what they have become – a nation without a conscience.

I watched soldiers board buses in the middle of the night, somber and teary eyed, even in their strength, as they left to invade a country in a war which even then made little sense. I watched them hold their heads high as families stood in the distance until the buses were no longer in view, and felt the emptiness of the darkness we were left with, wondering whether one of those men would be the first to die in a war whose cause has still not been defined.

I have walked across the sidewalks lined with almost 400 trees now, in the middle of Fort Stewart’s parade grounds; trees planted to remember lives lost. I’m sorry but I don’t see that to be an equal exchange and the memory of a lone soldier kneeling beside the base of one tree to leave a note for someone who had been so much more than a friend represents a loss this country can’t seem to comprehend.

Our soldiers deserve better than a congress that is willing to spend an entire night in a debate of futility.

Our soldiers deserve better than an administration that cares more about defending its right to hide its incompetence from us than it cares about even its own humanity, as it orders our soldiers to a war that has become nothing more than another act of covering the tracks of a leadership that has clearly demonstrated its inability to lead.

Our soldiers have been stranded in a country that is now decimated and in danger of becoming lawless because American citizens have sat idly by and allowed themselves to be led toward becoming a nation of lawlessness, and there is no end in sight unless American citizens step up and defend the laws which have given them their freedom for over two hundred years.

Where is your conscience, America?

Monica is the wife of Sgt. Kevin Benderman, a ten-year Army veteran who served a combat tour in Iraq and a year in prison for his public protest of war and the destruction it causes to civilians and to American military personnel. Please visit their website, www.BendermanDefense.org to learn more.

Last week the telluric social explosion that Peru is incubating reached its higher point when strikes and popular protests against Alan García’s government virtually paralyzed all departments and big cities on the country.

Nobody should be surprised. It was totally foregone. But it surely has taken aback both García and his pals, unable on their arrogance to gauge the socially irreversible uneasiness that they have sowed. It is just not possible to make fun of people as local oligarchy, imperialism and their servants in Peru have been doing for so long without paying for the consequences.

During the last decades Peruvians have experienced a very traumatic social process. Their historical conquests have been snatched from them one by one, including the national usufruct* of their most important natural resources – a usufruct that was achieved by the nationalist and extremely paternalistic military government of Velasco Alvarado. It must be said: the notable advances then reached on sovereignty, independence and social justice could not be explained without the social sensibility that the most radical generals had acquired. But this sensibility was due to the impact made upon their conscience by the heroic popular struggle they were ordered to repress, as the most honest and patriotic from them recognized.

The recent protests not only shine for their mass-scale and extension but for having been able to articulate multiple local struggles for peasants demands, construction of roads, defence of environment and other social issues, with regional labour strikes and entire cities taken over by nonconformists who often blocked freeways and took over airports, rail terminals and buses. The protests were agglutinated by the combative schoolteachers union’s general strike against the approval of a Bill intended to privatize education and also by strikes by miners, textile workers and departmental contingents from Peru’s Central General of Workers against the prevailing labour slavery: working days of twelve and fourteen hours without a Sunday rest, wages of hunger and terrible work conditions. The rejection of ALCA, promoted by García behind the nation’s back – so betraying one more of his campaign promises in abject genuflexion before George W. Bush – was an omnipresent factor during the strike.

Workers and peasants, together with dissimilar popular detachments, have been a decisive factor on the events with the support of both left-wing parties and Ollanta Humala’s Partido Nacionalista Peruano (Peruvian Nationalist Party). This announces promissory unitary perspectives to the cycle of struggles now open in the Andean nation, especially if they succeed in coordinating on a large front.

The rebellion’s detonating factors have been García’s failure to keep his electoral promises, his subordination to both transnational capital and the US as well as the existing obscene social inequality – while at the same time the government proclaims the success of economic growth – an 8 percent in 2006. The addition of votes obtained in 2006 by García and Humala during the second electoral round shows that a majority of electorate reject the neo-liberal model. In fact García had recognized that “it [the neoliberal model] has gone as far as it could go” and that it was necessary to change it, although once he hold office he has deepened it.

For years Peruvians have been suffering a mountain of offences, intensified by the corrupt, submissive and repressive Fujimori Administration, which happily sold off public companies and granted the most advantageous conditions to foreign investments. President Toledo followed later the same path. He, Fujimori and García were all demagogic and mendacious when they promised everything to the people during their electoral campaigns.

It is obvious that regarding García, people have reached the point of no return. It is confirmed by the message alert Peruvians have just sent him before the end of his first year in office. After his election I wrote the following:

“He is committed to Washington … so no one should expect … more than neo-liberal continuity … and most probable he won’t be able to finish his mandate as he will be toppled … by a people’s coup.”

I now maintain what I then said and I make it extensive to several pro-Yankee Latin American governments, from Rio Grande to Patagonia.

Note from the author:

*Huayco (from Quechua language): avalanche of material on the hillsides swept along by the water down the bottom of the valleys, entombing everything.

*Usufruct: “the right of enjoying all the advantages derivable from the use of something that belongs to another, as far as is compatible with the substance of the thing not being destroyed or injured.” (dictionary.com)

© Copyright 2007 by AxisofLogic.com

Please note: Reprints of this translation may be published on the condition that the author and original source (Axis of Logic) be cited. We also ask that the article appear without modification, linked to the original source. Thank you!

About the author: Angel Guerra Cabrera is a leading Cuban journalist who regularly appears on La Jornada (Mexico).

Thom Hartmann began his program on Thursday by reading from a new Executive Order which allows the government to seize the assets of anyone who interferes with its Iraq policies.

He then introduced old-line conservative Paul Craig Roberts — a former Assistant Secretary of the Treasury under Reagan who has recently become known for his strong opposition to the Bush administration and the Iraq War — by quoting the “strong words” which open Roberts’ latest column: “Unless Congress immediately impeaches Bush and Cheney, a year from now the US could be a dictatorial police state at war with Iran.”

“I don’t actually think they’re very strong,” said Roberts of his words. “I get a lot of flak that they’re understated and the situation is worse than I say. … When Bush exercises this authority [under the new Executive Order] … there’s no check to it. It doesn’t have to be ratified by Congress. The people who bear the brunt of these dictatorial police state actions have no recourse to the judiciary. So it really is a form of total, absolute, one-man rule. … The American people don’t really understand the danger that they face.”

Roberts said that because of Bush’s unpopularity, the Republicans face a total wipeout in 2008, and this may be why “the Democrats have not brought a halt to Bush’s follies or the war, because they expect his unpopular policies to provide them with a landslide victory in next year’s election.”

However, Roberts emphasized, “the problem with this reasoning is that it assumes that Cheney and Rove and the Republicans are ignorant of these facts, or it assumes that they are content for the Republican Party to be destroyed after Bush has his fling.” Roberts believes instead that Cheney and Rove intend to use a renewal of the War on Terror to rally the American people around the Republican Party. “Something’s in the works,” he said, adding that the Executive Orders need to create a police state are already in place.

“The administration figures themselves and prominent Republican propagandists … are preparing us for another 9/11 event or series of events,” Roberts continued. “Chertoff has predicted them. … The National Intelligence Estimate is saying that al Qaeda has regrouped. … You have to count on the fact that if al Qaeda’s not going to do it, it’s going to be orchestrated. … The Republicans are praying for another 9/11.”

Hartmann asked what we as the people can do if impeachment isn’t about to happen. “If enough people were suspicious and alert, it would be harder for the administration to get away with it,” Roberts replied. However, he added, “I don’t think these wake-up calls are likely to be effective,” pointing out the dominance of the mainstream media.

“Americans think their danger is terrorists,” said Roberts. “They don’t understand the terrorists cannot take away habeas corpus, the Bill of Rights, the Constitution. … The terrorists are not anything like the threat that we face to the Bill of Rights and the Constitution from our own government in the name of fighting terrorism. Americans just aren’t able to perceive that.”

Roberts pointed out that it’s old-line Republicans like himself, former Reagan associate deputy attorney general Bruce Fein, and Pat Buchanan who are the diehards in warning of the danger. “It’s so obvious to people like us who have long been associated in the corridors of power,” he said. “There’s no belief in the people or anything like that. They have agendas. The people are in the way. The Constitution is in the way. … Americans need to comprehend and look at how ruthless Cheney is. … A person like that would do anything.”

You might gather from a cursory examination of the wire services that “the Pentagon” has attacked Senator Hillary Clinton for requesting a briefing for her committee from the Department of Defense on contingency plans for withdrawal from Iraq.

But as Fred Kaplan of Slate pointed out, it was a specific bureaucrat who criticized her, undersecretary of defense for planning Eric Edelman. Edelman wrote to Senator Clinton (text at Talkingpointsmemo):

‘ Premature and public discussion of the withdrawal of U.S. forces from Iraq reinforces enemy propaganda that the United States will abandon its allies in Iraq much as we are perceived to have done in Vietnam, Lebanon and Somalia. … Such talk understandably unnerves the very same Iraqi allies we are asking to assume enormous personal risk in order to achieve compromises of national reconciliation. ‘

Edelman moved into government in the Reagan era, as RightWeb explains. He was close to Richard Perle, among the inventors of the warmongering Neoconservative ideology. In 1992 he was part of the Neoconservative team (which included Paul Wolfowitz) that co-authored a security doctrine for the United States that aimed at perpetual hegemony and implied perpetual aggression to prevent the emergence of “peer” powers.

He served as Dick Cheney’s national security adviser in the early zeroes and, along with convicted felon Irv Lewis Libby, was heavily involved in getting up the fraudulent and illegal Iraq War.

He was then sent as ambassador to Turkey to shore up that front in the war effort, after the Turkish parliament denied the US military permission to march through Anatolia into neighboring Iraq. He was denounced by Turkish commentators for behaving in Ankara like a colonial viceroy rather than like an ambassador. And then when arch-Neocon and then deputy secretary of defense Doug Feith was forced out under a cloud after one of his subordinates was caught spying for Israel, Edelman was installed as his successor. In other words, Cheney arranged for one Neoconservative to replace another.

Lest anyone doubt Edelman’s conversion to the Neoconservative cause, it should be remembered that when the Government Accounting Office lambasted Feith’s open interference in intelligence analysis and his practice of actually briefing his superiors on intelligence (which is forbidden to and probably illegal for defense department bureaucrats), Edelman wrote a long defense of Feith’s corrupt practices and forced the GAO to drop actual policy recommendations for ensuring they did not recur.

In my view, Secretary of Defense Robert Gates should have fired Edelman on the spot, since his subordinate was basically announcing his commitment to the kind of shady and illegitimate practices that Feith (whom then Secretary of State Colin Powell called ‘a card-carrying member of the [Israeli] Likud [Party]’) and his allies such as Cheney used to drag the United States into an Iraq War.

So, Hillary was not criticized by a military officer. No evidence Edelman knows one end of an M-16 from another. She was not criticized by a Defense Department veteran. Edelman is just a recently installed understudy to Feith.

Who was she criticized by? Just one of the last Neoconservatives who hasn’t yet been forced out of office because he abused the public trust or who hasn’t yet slid into a criminality fostered by sublime arrogance.

By implying that Clinton is a traitor, Edelman inserted himself into a presidential campaign on the Republican side. That is not a legitimate role for the third man in charge of the Pentagon.

Edelman knows the score and knew exactly what he was doing. Gates now has a second opportunity to do the right thing and fire Edelman. Otherwise, his already difficult task of restoring morale to the Pentagon will be complicated by the realization on the part of many DoD employees and military personnel that the Pentagon is once again being deployed for petty partisan purposes that leech out the meaning and morale of their institution.

A US Marine convicted of plotting to murder an Iraqi civilian outside Baghdad last year escaped a jail sentence for his crimes, the military said.

Trent Thomas, who was found guilty of conspiracy to kidnap and murder Hashim Ibrahim Awad in Hamdania on April 26 last year, hugged his family after receiving a reduction in rank and bad conduct discharge.

The 25-year-old former lance corporal, who has been held in detention since the allegations first surfaced last year, could have faced a life prison sentence for his role in Mr Awad’s killing.

On Thursday prosecutors had recommended Thomas be jailed for 15 years in order to send a message to other Marines during a hearing at the Camp Pendleton base outside San Diego.

Mr Awad, a 52-year-old father of 11, was taken from his home in a late-night raid by eight US servicemen and killed before the Marines involved covered up the incident to make it look as if Mr Awad was an insurgent planting a bomb.

The killing is one of a series of incidents that have tarnished the reputation of US forces in Iraq.

In closing arguments, military prosecutor lieutenant colonel John Baker had told the jury that the evidence presented had “proven to you that Corporal Trent D. Thomas is a murderer.”

“Corporal Thomas failed when he contracted to take part in this conspiracy and to cover up and lie,” Lt-Col Baker said.

“This is a plan to kill somebody in cold blood. They (the squad members) were a mob. Vigilante justice is against the law. He (Thomas) might as well have put a signature on a death warrant.”

However, defence lawyers said Thomas’s judgment had so been impaired by post traumatic stress disorder and brain damage following three tours of duty in Iraq that he went along with the plot.

Five other servicemen had already pleaded guilty at earlier hearings to lesser charges in connection with the incident.

One of the five, Robert Pennington, was jailed for eight years in February after pleading guilty to conspiracy to commit murder and kidnapping – the same charges Thomas had denied but was convicted of.

It was a slumber party on Capital Hill. Democrats held an all-nighter on July 17 in an attempt to mollify the great antiwar sentiment that is raging across the land. But their attempt to challenge Bush’s war on Iraq was sanctimonious and superficial at best. Not only were the Democrat’s pleas to set a timetable for withdraw fully pathetic, so too was their moral indignation.

The Democrats certainly don’t contest Bush’s Middle East foreign policy, they embrace it. Just last week the Senate voted 97-0 in favor of moving toward war with Iran. So while the Democrats call for withdraw of our troops from Iraq in the future, they insist we must keep an eye on Iran, for the Iranians are opposing the occupation of Iraq by allegedly arming the Shia resistance.

But the uprisings in Iraq were foreshadowed long ago. The Shia make up 60% of the country’s population, so they were sure to gain power with the outing of Saddam Hussein. Iran, a Shia political stronghold, was certainly going to benefit with the fall of Iraq’s dictator who remained an archenemy of Tehran until his regime was toppled. The Democrats and Republicans most certainly knew this. Regardless, both political parties see the rise of the Shia as an opening for a confrontation with Iran.

Iran isn’t the first scapegoat for the prevailing resistance fighting US armed forces in Iraq. There was a time when we were told the death of Saddam would bring stability to the country. It didn’t happen. Nor did the deaths of his sons Uday and Qusay or the bloody murder of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi. Iraq remains in turmoil and will continue to be thanks to our illegal invasion.

The Democrats don’t really want to end the war despite their veneer of opposition. If they desired to end the war they would have halted its funding long ago. Likelise, if they really preferred to challenge the Bush falsehoods regarding Iran, they would do so. Instead the Democrats, including their top presidential contenders Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama who voted in favor of holding Iran accountable for the killing of US soldiers, seem to want to handle Iran militarily.

The amendment, H.R.1585, written by Sen. Joe Lieberman, repeats the same round of vacant lies the neocons have been advancing for quite sometime. Iranian influence in Iraq is now becoming the accepted reason among American political elites as to why US forces are failing. The Lieberman amendment also claims that Iran is providing a safe-haven for al Qaeda fighters, even though the group is allegedly blowing up Iraqi Shias daily.

American soldiers aren’t being killed because of Iran; we are losing because there is no such thing as real victory for the US in Iraq. There is only death.

Like Iran’s non-existent nuclear arsenal, there is no evidence that Tehran is funding the Shia resistance. Most Iraqi citizens owned automatic weapons under Saddam and most roadside bombs can be manufactured using household products found in most American garages.

Today’s deeply disturbing revelations in Vanity Fair show the essential role US psychologists played in the torture of detainees in CIA and Department of Defense (DoD) custody, heightening the urgent need for the American Psychological Association (APA) to issue clear ethical guidelines prohibiting psychologists in the military or intelligence services from violating basic human rights as part of interrogation processes, the Coalition for an Ethical APA stated. When read in conjunction with the recently declassified Defense Department investigation which revealed that psychologists re-engineered counter-terrorist training techniques as mechanisms for detainee abuse at Guantánamo, in Afghanistan and in Iraq, this article is an indictment not only of participating psychologists, but of the Association which refuses to condemn these practices.

In early 2005, the APA appointed a Presidential Task Force to form ethics policy that was dominated by psychologists from the military and intelligence establishment, some of whom were involved in the very interrogation chains of command now shown to have facilitated abuse. The ethics policy of the APA and the report of the APA’s Presidential Task Force, taken together, currently allow psychologists to participate in national security interrogations, unlike physicians and psychiatrists, and even permits contravening the ethics code when faced with a conflicting “lawful order” from a governing authority.

“After two years of reports that psychologists were aiding abusive interrogations, we now have clear evidence that psychologists directly participated in torture. During this time the APA, the main voice of the psychological profession, has closed its eyes and ears to all reports of abuse,” said Dr. Stephen Soldz, Director of the Center for Research, Evaluation and Program Development of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis.

The Vanity Fair article reports the role of psychologists in developing the CIA’s regime of abusive interrogations (“torture”). The article states “that psychologists weren’t merely complicit in America’s aggressive new interrogation regime. Psychologists, working in secrecy, had actually designed the tactics and trained interrogators in them while on contract to the CIA.” Psychologists James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen of the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program were brought in by the CIA to use SERE techniques, developed to help our soldiers resist collaboration if captured, to break down detainees.

While Mitchell and Jessen used so-called “enhanced” techniques such as waterboarding (i.e., simulated drowning), most of their techniques became staples of interrogation tactics toward detainees in the war on terror and the conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan. The article quotes one source as describing the Mitchell and Jessen approach as being to “break down [the detainees] through isolation, [use] white noise, completely take away their ability to predict the future, [and] create dependence on interrogators.” The description of these techniques matches those techniques described by former interrogator Tony Lagouranis in his new book, Fear Up Harsh, as being used by numerous interrogators in Iraq.

The article also makes clear that the sometimes misplaced prestige of psychology as a science and the importance of the supposed “scientific credentials” of the SERE psychologists were crucial to the acceptance of these abusive techniques by general interrogation staff and superiors alike. The article additionally reports that the APA supported the claim that Mitchell and Jessen had specialized scientific knowledge by inviting them to a joint APA-Rand Corporation, CIA-funded conference on the “Science of Deception: Integration of Practice and Theory.” This conference debated “the effectiveness of truth serum and other coercive techniques,” according to Vanity Fair.

The article also reports that these SERE-based techniques developed by Mitchell and Jessen in the CIA’s secret “black sites” proliferated to other venues where detainees were interrogated, including Guantánamo, Afghanistan, and Iraq. The proliferation of SERE techniques was aided by the scientific “patina” afforded by psychology, as stated in the article by Human Rights Watch’s John Sifton. The article further reports that psychologists at Guantanamo participated in interrogations as judges of abuse levels, as “safety officers” deciding just how much abuse a given detainee could tolerate. This very role has been objected to by other health provider organizations, including the American Medical Association.

Since 2005, multiple press reports and government documents have clearly demonstrated that US military and intelligence service psychologists were involved in developing a regime of psychological torture for use on suspected terrorists. In May, the Department of Defense Office of the Inspector General (OIG) declassified a report revealing that psychologists from the military’s SERE program worked with US military psychologists at Guantanamo tasked with “developing the standard operating procedure” for interrogations using tactics that violate the Geneva Conventions. The OIG report also documented that these SERE psychologists played a role in bringing abusive interrogation techniques to Iraq and that the SERE-based techniques also migrated to Afghanistan.

“When the APA leadership chose psychologists to formulate its ethical position on interrogations and torture, they included six from the military and intelligence services, some of whom were in the chain of command that directed the abuse,” said Steven Reisner, of the Coalition for an Ethical APA and Columbia University’s International Trauma Studies Program. “Is it really any surprise that, unlike psychiatrists and physicians who prohibited their members’ participation in interrogation, the APA concluded that psychologists could abandon ‘do no harm’ in favor of ‘break them down?'”

Increasingly, as the number of these reports multiplied, members of the APA have called for the Association to unequivocally condemn the use of psychological knowledge for purposes of coercion, abuse and torture, and to take concrete steps to prevent further participation of psychologists in abusive interrogations. In June, the Coalition for an Ethical APA sent an Open Letter to the President of the APA, Dr. Sharon Brehm, demanding swift and comprehensive changes in APA policy. In six weeks, the number of signatories to the letter has risen to over 650. The APA leadership has yet to respond to this letter. Soon afterwards, 58 psychologists from the National Consortium of Torture Treatment Programs issued an additional letter expressing outrage over the failure of the APA to adequately respond to the growing evidence of psychologist involvement in torture. Numerous individual psychologists have written additional letters of protest, and a group of APA members has organized a campaign to withhold their dues until the APA changes its ethical policy to prohibit such abuses.

“The evidence was strong and is now irrefutable,” states Brad Olson, chair of Divisions for Social Justice (DSJ), a collection of divisions within the APA, and faculty member at Northwestern University, “psychologists not only organized abusive interrogations, they directly participated in torture itself. APA members and psychologists everywhere will not stop our efforts until the APA changes its policy to prevent these disturbing violations of human rights from happening again.”

The APA leadership has stated repeatedly that psychologists’ participation in interrogations help keep interrogations “safe, legal, ethical, and effective.” The public record now suggests that the exact opposite is the case.

In response, the Coalition for an Ethical APA today reasserted its call for basic changes in APA policy regarding participation in interrogations and for fundamental reforms in the Association to prevent the reoccurrence of such catastrophic ethical breaches in the future, the Coalition said. The Coalition believes it is critical that the APA take immediate steps to remedy the damage done to the reputation of the profession and its ethical standards, to the Association, and to human rights, in general.

The group urgently recommends the following:

1. The President of the APA must immediately acknowledge errors and abuses committed by its leadership, and substantively reaffirm its commitment to promoting adherence by all psychologists to international human rights standards.

2. The APA Board of Directors and Ethics Committee must endorse the APA Moratorium on psychologist participation in interrogations of foreign detainees, to be voted upon at the August convention.

3. The APA Board of Directors must encourage, support, and cooperate with ongoing Senate investigations into the role of psychologist’s utilization of SERE techniques in developing the US regime of psychological torture used at Guantanamo, in Iraq and Afghanistan, the CIA Black Sites, and elsewhere.

4. The APA Board of Directors must commence a neutral third-party investigation of its own involvement, and that of APA staff, in APA-military conflicts of interest. Among the issues this investigation must examine are:

a) the numerous procedural irregularities alleged to have occurred during the PENS process;

b) the role of the military and intelligence agencies in the formation and functioning of the PENS Task Force;

c) the reasons the APA and its leadership have systematically ignored the accumulating evidence that psychologists participating in interrogations are contributing to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, rather than helping to prevent it;

d) the overall nexus of close ties between the APA staff/leadership and the military and intelligence agencies, ties that may have contributed to a climate that permits undo influence of military and intelligence agencies in the creation of these policies and that encourages turning a blind eye to abuse;

e) the transformation of the APA Ethics Code, from one that protects psychologists’ ethical conduct when such conduct conflicts with law and military regulations to one that protects psychologists who follow unethical law and military regulations.

The Coalition for an Ethical APA calls on all concerned APA members and other psychologists to join them by signing the Open Letter to APA President Sharon Brehm, to participate actively in mini-convention sessions on ethics and interrogation at the APA Convention in San Francisco beginning this August 18th, and to join the demonstrations planned for this Convention [information available at http://ethicalapa.com/].

The Coalition for an Ethical APA unites psychologists deeply concerned about our Association’s failure to act on this major crisis facing our profession.

CONTACTS:

Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Phone: 617-469-3576
Cell: 617-935-4246

Steven Reisner
SReisner@psychoanalysis.net
Office: 212-633-8391
Cell: 646-415-1413

Okay, it’s another lemon, the second you’ve bought from the same used-car lot — and for $1,000 more than the first. The transmission is a mess; the muffler’s clunking; smoke’s seeping out of the dashboard; and you’ve only had it a week. You took it, grudgingly, as a replacement for that beat-up old Camry that only lasted two months, but the salesman assured you it was a winner. No wonder you’re driving onto the lot right now. Before you can even complain, the same salesman’s there. He’s firm. It’s not his fault. You must have done something. Nonetheless, he’s ready to offer you a great deal. For an extra 2,000 bucks, you can have the rusted-out Honda Prelude right behind him, the one that, as a matter of fact, has just burst into flames — and, he assures you, it’s a dandy. It may not look so great today, what with the smoking hood and all, but it’s a vehicle for the ages.

Would you buy a used car from this man? (Hint: He looks remarkably like George Bush.)

Or try it this way:

When you first fell ill — nausea and gnawing stomach pain — you went to that new doctor in town. He diagnosed you with stomach flu, prescribed an acid blocker and vicodin, and told you not to worry a bit. After that, you started vomiting up brown gunk. So you dragged yourself back to the doctor, who added an anti-nausea drug and a cathartic to your regimen. Two days later, you blacked out. You wake up to find yourself in a hospital bed, blood transfusing into your arm. The same doctor is at your bedside, insisting that you be anesthetized and immediately operated on for a bleeding ulcer. He also has a form he says you must sign that relieves him of all responsibility for perforating your stomach or anything else that may occur in the course of the procedure.

Would you take the advice of this man? (Hint: He looks remarkably like Dick Cheney.)

In fact, no set of images from elsewhere in life can do real justice to the Bush administration and the Washington it exists in. In our normal lives, no one could get it so wrong so often and still be given the slightest credence.

And everything in the world of opinion polls points to Americans having reached exactly this conclusion about the President and his team. Call it the American consensus. Recent polls indicate that most of the public has simply stopped listening to George W. Bush and other administration figures who have proven incapable of predicting which policy foot will fall where in the next 60 seconds, no less what might happen, based on their acts, in Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, or anywhere else.

The polling figures also indicate that there are essentially no Democrats left to be moved from the presidential approval to the disapproval columns; that hardly an “independent” remains on the approval horizon; and that what’s always referred to as the President’s Republican “base” is delaminating by the week. The latest Harris poll, for instance, has the President’s approval ratings at 26% and so in a tie with Richard Nixon’s Watergate-worst Harris low; and the Vice President has hit his own new low at 21%; while, in the cumulative average of polls at Pollster.com, Bush’s approval rating has dropped under 28%. In the last six weeks, if you check out the long-term arc of such ratings, it looks as if George has taken a nosedive off a disapproval cliff.

The latest Gallup poll has, for the first time, breeched 30% on the twisting, downward road away from presidential approval and has also registered a record high in opposition to Bush’s Iraq policy. In addition, only 24% of Gallup’s respondents claim to be “satisfied with the way things are going in the United States at this time” (27% in the latest Newsweek poll, and a mere 19% in the last NBC/Wall Street Journal poll). Other polls show similar results.