All in the Mind - Too Much Reality (on PTSD)

A good episode of All in the Mind this week that looks at PTSD, particularly as related to war and combat. They also examine one of the newer treatment approaches, neurofeedback.

Too much reality

Lynne Malcolm  |  Sunday 27 April 2014

• Listen now

• Download audio

• show transcript

Image: (Steve Jacobs (Getty))
It used to be known as shell shock but we now know that post traumatic stress disorder can develop in a range of contexts, and that the devastating symptoms are not only psychological and emotional, but can severely effect our physical health as well. Meet a retired SAS military commander and a Cambodian refugee who both know this only too well. We also hear about the latest treatments including neurofeedback.

Guests 

• Leahkhana Suos - Cambodian refugee & client at the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTS) 
• Stuart Bonner - Retired SAS military commander 
• Professor Sandy McFarlane
• Mirjana Askovic - Psychologist & Senior Neurofeedback Counsellor at the NSW Service for the Treatment and Rehabilitation of Torture and Trauma Survivors (STARTTS) 

Publications

Redback One: The True Story of an Australian SAS Hero by Robert Macklin

Further Information  

• NSW Service for the treatment and rehabilitation of torture and trauma survivors
• Veterans and veterans families counselling service
• Department of Veterans Affairs
• Lifeline 131114

A Call for Annulment of APA’s PENS Report (on Torture)

Left: Marty Seligman. A Guantanamo detainee sits alone inside a fenced area during his daily outside period,

at Guantanamo Bay U.S. Naval Base, Cuba.

A friend sent this to me the other day - I signed it. If you are involved in the counseling or psychology world in any way, you may want to sign it too.

By way of background, this story ran in Salon in 2010:

“War on terror” psychologist gets giant no-bid contract


The Army has handed a $31 million deal to Dr. Martin Seligman, who once blasted academics for "forgetting 9/11"


BY MARK BENJAMIN


The Army earlier this year steered a $31 million contract to a psychologist whose work formed the psychological underpinnings of the Bush administration’s torture program.


The Army awarded the “sole source” contract in February to the University of Pennsylvania for resilience training, or teaching soldiers to better cope with the psychological strain of multiple combat tours. The university’s Positive Psychology Center, directed by famed psychologist Martin Seligman, is conducting the resilience training.


Army contracting documents show that nobody else was allowed to bid on the resilience-training contract because “there is only one responsible source due to a unique capability provided, and no other supplies or services will satisfy agency requirements.” And yet, Salon was able to identify resilience training experts at other institutions around the country, including the University of Maryland and the Mayo Clinic. In fact, in 2008 the Marine Corps launched a project with UCLA to conduct resilience training for Marines and their families at nine military bases across the United States and in Okinawa, Japan.

Continue Reading

Here is the email and the information on how to add your name to the petition.

Dear Colleagues,


The Coalition for an Ethical Psychology is spearheading a call for annulment of the American Psychological Association’s deeply flawed 2005 Presidential Task Force Report on Psychological Ethics and National Security (PENS).


The key conclusion of the PENS Report – despite clear evidence to the contrary – is that psychologists play a critical role in keeping national security detainee interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” The PENS Report continues to be used as an authoritative document today, especially in national security contexts. Leading human rights groups and professionals from a range of fields – including psychology, medicine, law, military, and intelligence –have therefore joined together in this important annulment effort.


Below is the brief petition statement, along with the names of organizations and individuals that have been “early signers” to the call. A background statement with detailed documentation is available online at www.ethicalpsychology.org/PENS_Annulment_Background_Statement.pdf.


We are now reaching out to professionals from a variety of disciplines and the general public because we believe this is a critical human rights issue with ramifications that extend far beyond psychology alone. We hope you will join this initiative, and there are two valuable ways that you can contribute:


1. Please add your name to the annulment call at www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens.


2. Please share this email and accompanying information with your professional colleagues through listservs and personal correspondence, so that they too have the opportunity to sign on.


Thank you for your time and consideration.


Sincerely,
Roy Eidelson, on behalf of the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

A Call for Annulment of APA’s PENS Report

(www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens)

Over the decade since the horrendous attacks of 9/11, the world has been shocked by the specter of abusive interrogations and the torture of national security prisoners by agents of the United States government. Although psychologists in the U.S. have made significant contributions to societal welfare on many fronts during this period, the profession tragically has also witnessed psychologists acting as planners, consultants, researchers, and overseers to these abusive interrogations. Moreover, in the guise of keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective," psychologists were used to provide legal protection for otherwise illegal treatment of prisoners.


The American Psychological Association’s (APA) 2005 Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security (the PENS Report) is the defining document endorsing psychologists’ engagement in detainee interrogations. Despite evidence that psychologists were involved in abusive interrogations, the PENS Task Force concluded that psychologists play a critical role in keeping interrogations “safe, legal, ethical and effective.” With this stance, the APA, the largest association of psychologists worldwide, became the sole major professional healthcare organization to support practices contrary to the international human rights standards that ought to be the benchmark against which professional codes of ethics are judged.


The PENS Report remains highly influential today. Negating efforts by APA members to limit the damages – including passage of an unprecedented member-initiated referendum in 2008 – the Department of Defense continues to disseminate the PENS Report in its instructions to psychologists involved in intelligence operations. The Report also has been adopted, at least informally, as the foundational ethics document for “operational psychology” as an area of specialization involving psychologists in counterintelligence and counterterrorism operations. And the PENS Report is repeatedly cited as a resource for ethical decision-making in the APA Ethics Committee’s new National Security Commentary, a “casebook” for which the APA is currently soliciting feedback.


Equally troubling, the PENS Report was the result of institutional processes that were illegitimate, inconsistent with APA’s own standards, and far outside the norms of transparency, independence, diversity, and deliberation for similar task forces established by professional associations. Deeply problematic aspects include the inherent bias in the Task Force membership (e.g., six of the nine voting members were on the payroll of the U.S. military and/or intelligence agencies, with five having served in chains of command accused of prisoner abuses); significant conflicts of interest (e.g., unacknowledged participants included the spouse of a Guantánamo intelligence psychologist and several high-level lobbyists for Department of Defense and CIA funding for psychologists); irregularities in the report approval process (e.g., the Board’s use of emergency powers that preempted standard review mechanisms); and unwarranted secrecy associated with the Report (e.g., unusual prohibitions on Task Force members’ freedom to discuss the Report). These realities point to the impossibility and inadequacy of merely updating or correcting deficiencies in the PENS Report.


We the undersigned organizations and individuals – health professionals, social scientists, social justice and human rights scholars and activists, and concerned military and intelligence professionals – therefore declare that the PENS Report is illegitimate. We call upon the American Psychological Association to take immediate steps to annul the PENS Report. At the same time, in our own efforts, we aim to make the illegitimacy of the PENS Report more broadly known within our communities.


September 26, 2011
(Visit www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens to add your signature)


Organizational Signers
Coalition for an Ethical Psychology
Bill of Rights Defense Committee
Center for Constitutional Rights
Center for Justice and Accountability
International Human Rights Clinic at Harvard Law School
Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture
Network of Spiritual Progressives
Physicians for Human Rights
Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Veterans for Peace
Veteran Intelligence Professionals for Sanity


Individual Signers (listed affiliations are for identification purposes only)
Roy Eidelson, PhD, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Associate Director, Solomon Asch Center for Study of Ethnopolitical Conflict, Bryn Mawr College
Jean Maria Arrigo, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Project on Ethics and Art in Testimony
Michael Wessells, PhD, APA PENS Task Force Member, Professor of Clinical Population and Family Health, Columbia University
Stephen Soldz, PhD, Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis; Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Steven Reisner, PhD, Candidate for APA President; Clinical Assistant Professor, NYU Medical School; Faculty and Supervisor, International Trauma Studies Program, New York City
Brad Olson, PhD, President-Elect, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Bryant Welch, PhD, Program Director and Professor of Psychology, California Institute of Integral Studies, San Francisco, CA
Trudy Bond, PhD, Independent Psychologist; Steering Committee, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Philip Zimbardo, President, American Psychological Association (2002); Professor Emeritus, Department of Psychology, Stanford University
Stephen N. Xenakis, MD, Brigadier General (Ret), U.S. Army
Nathaniel A. Raymond, Former Director of the Campaign Against Torture at Physicians for Human Rights
Leonard Rubenstein, Senior Scholar, Center for Public Health and Human Rights, Johns Hopkins School of Public Health
Noam Chomsky, Institute Professor (ret.), Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Robert Jay Lifton, Lecturer in Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School/Cambridge Health Alliance; Distinguished Professor Emeritus of Psychiatry and Psychology, The City University of New York
Manfred Nowak, Professor for International Law and Human Rights, University of Vienna; Director, Ludwig Boltzmann Institute of Human Rights
David Remes, Appeal for Justice; Guantánamo habeas attorney since 2004
Gerald Gray, LCSW, Co-Director, Institute for Redress & Recovery, Santa Clara University School of Law
Morton Deutsch, Past President, APA Divisions 8 (Society for Personality and Social Psychology), 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues), and 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, Psychology and Education, Teachers College, Columbia University
Nora Sveaass, UN Committee Against Torture; Associate Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Oslo, Norway
Steven H. Miles, MD, Professor of Medicine and Bioethics, University of Minnesota
George Hunsinger, Professor of Systematic Theology, Princeton Theological Seminary
Vincent Iacopino, MD, PhD, Senior Medical Advisor, Physicians for Human Rights; Adjunct Professor of Medicine, University of Minnesota Medical School; Senior Research Fellow, Human Rights Center, University of California, Berkeley
David DeBatto, former US Army Counterintelligence Special Agent and Iraq war veteran
Buz Eisenberg, Chair, International Justice Network; Attorney for Guantánamo detainees since 2005
Michael Ratner, President Emeritus, Center for Constitutional Rights
Vince Warren, Executive Director, Center for Constitutional Rights
Susan Opotow, Past President, APA Division 9 (Society for the Psychological Study of Social Issues); Professor, City University of New York
Richard Wagner, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, Bates College
Marc Pilisuk, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Professor Emeritus, University of California; Professor, Saybrook Graduate School and Research Center
Ethel Tobach, PhD, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); American Museum of Natural History, New York
Joseph de Rivera, Past President, APA Division 48 (Peace Psychology); Research Professor, Clark University
James Coyne, PhD, Director, Behavioral Oncology Program, Abramson Cancer Center and Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, University of Pennsylvania School of Medicine
Luisa Saffiotti, PhD, President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Jancis Long, PhD, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility
Frank Summers, PhD, President-Elect (as of January 2012), APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis); Clinical Professor of Psychiatry and the Behavioral Sciences, Feinberg School of Medicine, Northwestern University
Alice Shaw, PhD, President, Section IX, APA Division 39 (Psychoanalysis for Social Responsibility)
Jules Lobel, President, Center for Constitutional Rights; Bessie McKee Walthour Endowed Chair Professor of Law, University of Pittsburgh Law School
Bernice Lott, Professor Emerita of Psychology and Women’s Studies, University of Rhode Island
Ruth Fallenbaum, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Dan Aalbers, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Anthony Marsella, Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility; Emeritus Professor, Department of Psychology, University of Hawaii
Ghislaine Boulanger, PhD, WithholdAPADues Steering Committee
Jean L. Hill, PhD, President-Elect, APA Division 27 (Society for Community Research and Action); Professor of Psychology, New Mexico Highlands University
Joseph Margulies, Attorney, MacArthur Justice Center, Clinical Professor, Northwestern Law School
Martha Davis, PhD, Visiting Scholar (ret.), John Jay College of Criminal Justice, City University of New York
Kristine Huskey, Director, Anti-Torture Program, Physicians for Human Rights; Guantanamo detainee habeas counsel (2002-2011)
Scott Horton, Columbia University School of Law
William P. Quigley, Professor of Law, Loyola University New Orleans
Rabbi Michael Lerner, Editor, Tikkun Magazine; Executive Director, The Institute for Labor and Mental Health
Scott Allen, MD, Clinical Associate Professor, School of Medicine, University of California, Riverside
M. Brinton Lykes, PhD, Professor of Community-Cultural Psychology, Boston College; Co-Founder, Ignacio Martin-Baro Fund for Mental Health and Human Rights
David Luban, University Professor in Law and Philosophy, Georgetown University
Jeffrey S. Kaye, PhD, Clinician, Survivors International, San Francisco
Sibel Edmonds, Founder & Director, National Security Whistleblowers Coalition (NSWBC)
David Sloan-Rossiter, Boston Institute for Psychotherapy; Massachusetts Institute for Psychoanalysis
Stephen R. Shalom, Department of Political Science, William Paterson University
Andrea Cousins, PhD, PsyD, Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT), Northampton, MA
Lynne Layton, PhD, Assistant Professor of Psychology, Department of Psychiatry, Harvard Medical School
Deborah Popowski, Clinical Instructor, International Human Rights Clinic; Lecturer on Law, Harvard Law School


(Names of additional signers are available at www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens/signers.php)


--


Stephen Soldz
Director, Center for Research, Evaluation, and Program Development
Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis
1581 Beacon St.
Brookline, MA 02446
ssoldz@bgsp.edu
Past President, Psychologists for Social Responsibility (PsySR)

Tzvetan Todorov - What the war on terror has done to America

Interesting perspective . . . . This comes from Adbusters recent philosophy issue. Tzvetan Todorov is the author of The Fear of Barbarians: Beyond the Clash of Civilizations. The ethical issues raised by this post are especially relevant in light of the Osama bin Laden assassination, achieved with the aid of information gathered through "enhanced" interrogation methods, such as those described below.

Moral Collapse of a Nation

What the war on terror has done to America.

Tzvetan Todorov , 18 Apr 2011

The son of an Afghan farmer, who was killed on Jan. 15, 2010. A member of the "kill team" is posing behind him.

Audio version read by George Atherton – Right-click to download

The actual existence of torture in American jails is well known. Nonetheless, the publication on 16 April 2009, by the new United States administration, of documents that had hitherto been kept secret revealed details concerning the actual way in which torture was being carried out. I will briefly summarize these facts.

One is struck, first of all, by the incredibly persnickety regulations that were formulated in the CIA manuals and taken over by the legal authorities in the government. Up until then it had been possible to imagine that the practices of torture were what are called “blunders,” involuntary transgressions of the norms, occasioned by the urgency of the situation. Now on the contrary, it is clear that these were procedures fixed down to their least details, to the nearest inch and the nearest second.

They are divided into three categories, each of which comprises several degrees of intensity: preparatory (nakedness, manipulated feeding, sleep deprivation), corrective (blows) and coercive (being hosed with water, locked in boxes, or subjected to torture by immersion). Slaps on the face must be administered by the fingers spread out, halfway between the tip of the chin and the bottom of the earlobe. Hosing a naked prisoner with water can last for 20 minutes if the water is at 5°C, 40 if it is at 10°C, and up to 60 if it is 15°C. Sleep deprivation must not last longer than 180 hours, but, after 8 hours’ rest, they can begin again. Torture by immersion can last up to 12 seconds, no more than 2 hours per day, for 30 consecutive days (a particularly tough prisoner underwent this torture 183 times over, in March 2003). A prisoner should not be locked in a box for more than 2 hours, but if the box allows the prisoner to stand upright, he can stay there up to eight hours at a stretch, 18 hours per day. If you put an insect in with him, you cannot tell the prisoner that its sting will be extremely painful or indeed deadly. And so on and so forth, for page after page.

The indispensable partners of the torturers are the government’s legal advisers, who are there to ensure that their colleagues are immune from prosecution. This, too, is new: torture is no longer represented as an infraction of the common norm, regrettable but excusable; it is the legal norm. With this in mind, lawyers resort to another series of techniques. To get around the law, interrogations need to be conducted outside the United States, even if this means American bases. According to the official legal definitions, there is torture when the intention to produce intense suffering can be attested; so it will be suggested to the torturers that they deny the presence of any such intention. So slaps on the face are given not to produce any pain, but to cause surprise and humiliation. Being locked in a box is not meant to lead to sensory disorientation, but to make the prisoner feel uncomfortable! The torturer must always insist on his “good faith,” his “honest beliefs” and his reasonable premises. Euphemisms must be systematically employed: “reinforced techniques” instead of torture; “expert interrogator” for torturer. Care must also be taken to avoid leaving any material traces, and for this reason mental destruction is preferable to physical damage; for this reason, too, any visual recording of sessions is to be destroyed afterwards.

~ Tzvetan Todorov, The Fear of Barbarians. Todorov is a Bulgarian philosopher who studied at the University of Paris with Roland Barthes. He is the author of numerous books, including On Human Diversity and Hope and Memory, and has taught at Harvard, Yale and Columbia.

Tags: Moral Collapse of a Nation, war on terror, America, Tzvetan Todorov, torture, Iraq, Afghanistan, Adbusters, terrorism, torture, war, morality, Philosophy, CIA, torture manual, interrogation, The Fear of Barbarians, Osama bin Laden

You Can't Trust A Tortured Brain: Neuroscience Discredits Coercive Interrogation

[image source]

Many of us are opposed to torture on moral grounds. Then there is the fact that people will say nearly anything to make the torture stop. Now there is neuroscientific proof that information obtained through torture is likely not reliable due to the impact of torture on the brain and its memory circuits.

You Can't Trust A Tortured Brain: Neuroscience Discredits Coercive Interrogation

ScienceDaily (Sep. 21, 2009) — According to a new review of neuroscientific research, coercive interrogation techniques used during the Bush administration to extract information from terrorist suspects are likely to have been unsuccessful and may have had many unintended negative effects on the suspect's memory and brain functions.

A new article, published in the journal, Trends in Cognitive Science, reviews scientific evidence demonstrating that repeated and extreme stress and anxiety have a detrimental influence on brain functions related to memory.

Memos released by the US Department of Justice in April of 2009 detailing coercive interrogation techniques suggest that prolonged periods of shock, stress, anxiety, disorientation and lack of control are more effective than standard interrogatory techniques in making subjects reveal truthful information from memory. "This is based on the assumption that subjects will be motivated to reveal veridical information to end interrogation, and that extreme stress, shock and anxiety do not impact memory" says review author, Professor Shane O'Mara from the Institute of Neuroscience at Trinity College in Dublin, Ireland. "However, this model of the impact of extreme stress on memory and the brain is utterly unsupported by scientific evidence."

Psychological studies suggest that during extreme stress and anxiety, the captive will be conditioned to associate speaking with periods of safety. For the captor, when the captive speaks, the objective of gaining information will have been obtained and there will be relief from the unsavory task of administering these conditions of stress. Therefore, it is difficult or impossible to determine during the interrogation whether the captive is revealing truthful information or just talking to escape the torture. Research has also shown that extreme stress has a deleterious effect on the frontal lobe and is associated with the production of false memories.

Neurochemical studies have revealed that the hippocampus and prefrontal cortex, brain regions integral to the process of memory, are rich in receptors for hormones that are activated by stress and sleep deprivation and which have been shown to have deleterious effects on memory. "To briefly summarize a vast, complex literature, prolonged and extreme stress inhibits the biological processes believed to support memory in the brain," says O'Mara. "For example, studies of extreme stress with Special Forces Soldiers have found that recall of previously-learned information was impaired after stress occurred." Waterboarding in particular is an extreme stressor and has the potential to elicit widespread stress-induced changes in the brain.

"Given our current cognitive neurobiological knowledge, it is unlikely that coercive interrogations involving extreme stress will facilitate release of truthful information from long term memory," concludes Professor O'Mara. "On the contrary, these techniques cause severe, repeated and prolonged stress, which compromises brain tissue supporting both memory and decision making."

---

Journal reference:

1. O'Mara et al. Torturing the Brain: On the folk psychology and folk neurobiology motivating 'enhanced and coercive interrogation' techniques. Trends in Cognitive Science, September 21, 2009

Adapted from materials provided by Cell Press, via EurekAlert!, a service of AAAS.

Tags: Torturing the Brain, folk psychology, folk neurobiology, enhanced interrogation, coercive interrogation, torture, Science Daily, Shane O'Mara, anxiety, stress, You Can't Trust A Tortured Brain, Neuroscience, CIA, Psychology, brain

Jesse Ventura on Dick Cheney and Waterboarding

Classic Ventura - a man who always speaks his mind.

And on this topic, Ventura's point of view carries A LOT more weight than Cheney's, since he has been waterboarded as part of his Navy Seal training. It's amusing how all these people in the Bush administration who never served in the military dare to speak on what constitutes torture. Ventura served and believes that waterboarding is not only torture, but is literal drowning (not a mere simulation).

This comes from Video Cafe and Crooks and Liars.

Jesse Ventura: You Give Me a Water Board, Dick Cheney and One Hour, and I'll Have Him Confess to the Sharon Tate Murders

By Heather Tuesday May 12, 2009 10:00am

DOWNLOAD (2587)

PLAY (19414)

On Larry King Live Jesse Ventura takes on the Bush administration chickenhawks and Rush Limbaugh, and defends Colin Powell. After being waterboarded himself in the SERE program, Ventura makes no bones about it. Waterboarding is torture. I'd like to see Hannity have Ventura on his show to debate the issue.

King's reaction to Ventura's straight talk on how terrible of a President W was is amusing. He's shocked...just shocked I tell you, that anyone would talk so badly about our former President.

KING: Joining us now, Jesse Ventura, former wrestler, former governor of Minnesota, former Navy SEAL, the author of "Don't Start The Revolution Without Me." That book is now out in paper back. Welcome to have you back, Jesse. There you see the cover of the book. How's Obama doing?

JESSE VENTURA, FMR. GOV. OF MINNESOTA: Too early to tell, Larry, really. In my opinion, George Bush is the worst president in my lifetime.

KING: Have an opinion, will you?

VENTURA: I will. I will. And he's the worst president in my lifetime. So Barack Obama, President Obama inherited something I wouldn't wish on my worst enemy. You know? Two wars, an economy that's borderline depression. So it's far too early to judge him 100 days in. I think if you have me back about two years from now, I can give you a much better of how he's doing.

KING: He poked fun at himself at the White House correspondents' dinner Saturday night. Let's watch.

(BEGIN VIDEO CLIP)

BARACK OBAMA, PRESIDENT OF THE UNITED STATES: Finally, I believe that my next 100 days will be so successful I'll be able to complete them in 72 days. And on the 73rd day, I will rest.

(END VIDEO CLIP)

KING: He's very likable.

VENTURA: Oh, yes.

KING: Right?

VENTURA: Very intelligent, which is a change from our previous president.

KING: All right already with Bush.

VENTURA: No, I live in Mexico now, Larry. So I do a lot of reading. I don't watch much TV. This year's reading, I covered Bush's life. I covered Guantanamo and a few other subjects. And I'm very disturbed about it.

I'm bothered over Guantanamo because it seems we have created our own Hanoi Hilton. We can live with that? I have a problem. I will criticize President Obama on this level; it's a good thing I'm not president because I would prosecute every person that was involved in that torture. I would prosecute the people that did it. I would prosecute the people that ordered it. Because torture is against the law. KING: You were a Navy SEAL.

VENTURA: That's right. I was water boarded, so I know -- at SERE School, Survival Escape Resistance Evasion. It was a required school you had to go to prior to going into the combat zone, which in my era was Vietnam. All of us had to go there. We were all, in essence -- every one of us was water boarded. It is torture.

KING: What was it like?

VENTURA: It's drowning. It gives you the complete sensation that you are drowning. It is no good, because you -- I'll put it to you this way, you give me a water board, Dick Cheney and one hour, and I'll have him confess to the Sharon Tate murders.

KING: Even though you know it's not going to happen -- even though before it, you know you're not going to drown.

VENTURA: You don't know it. If it's -- if it's done wrong, you certainly could drown. You could swallow your tongue. You could do a whole bunch of stuff. If it's it done wrong or -- it's torture, Larry. It's torture.

[.....]

KING: A lot of things to go into, Jesse. What do you make of the Cheney/Limbaugh --

VENTURA: I don't have a lot of respect for Dick Cheney. Here's a guy who got five deferments from the Vietnam War. Clearly, he's a coward. He wouldn't go when it was his time to go. And now he is a chicken hawk. Now he is this big tough guy who wants this hardcore policy. And he's the guy that sanctioned all this torture by calling it enhanced interrogation.

KING: Do you think Rush Limbaugh's a better Republican than Colin Powell?

VENTURA: No, not at all. In fact, if you compare the two, let's look at Colin Powell, who's a war hero, who strapped it on for his country, and didn't run and hide.

KING: Twice.

VENTURA: And then you look at Dick Cheney who ran and hid. I have no respect for Dick Cheney. I have tremendous respect for General Powell.

Tags: torture, Politics, government, Jesse Ventura, Dick Cheney, waterboarding, Video Cafe, Crooks and Liars, Larry King, Bush administration

In These Times - The Psychologists of Torture

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I have a tough accepting that torture can EVER be an acceptable way of getting information, not withstanding the issue that it seldom works. I have an even tougher time with psychologists and psychiatrists who participated in the torturing of detainees (i.e., prisoners of war, in violation of the Geneva Conventions). Prime directive: Do No Harm.

In These Times takes a look at The Psychologists of Torture.

The Psychologists of Torture

Medical professionals designed and helped to implement Bush administration interrogation practices.

By Frederick Clarkson

'The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice,' says Physicians for Human Rights' Steven Reisner.

One of the key, if under-reported, findings in Tuesday’s bombshell Senate committee report on the Bush-era treatment of U.S. military detainees was the role of civilian and military psychologists in devising, directing and overseeing the torture of prisoners.

While the report highlights the role of senior Bush administration officials in approving “aggressive” interrogation techniques, it also exposes how medical professionals helped to transform the Pentagon’s torture resistance program into tactics used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA “black” sites.

Understanding the role of these professionals should be a “specific focus” of an investigation into the use of these tactics, according to Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), which has condemned the tactics as illegal and medically unethical.

In a series of reports available on its Web site, PHR details the tactics, which it says include beating, sexual and cultural humiliation, forced nakedness, exposure to extreme temperatures, exploitation of phobias, sleep deprivation and sensory deprivation.

The Cambridge, Mass.-based organization, which won a Nobel Peace Prize in 1997, says psychologists “led the way” in legitimizing the Pentagon’s approval and use of the tactics. It has joined the Senate Armed Services Committee in calling on U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder to investigate who should be held accountable.

From Korea to Gitmo

The carefully worded Senate report reveals how the torture tactics developed directly from the military’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape (SERE) training program, which was designed to help downed American pilots resist torture.

The SERE program was based on interrogation methods used by the Chinese during the Korean War that aimed to elicit false confessions from American prisoners for propaganda purposes. Designed to enhance resistance to torture, the SERE program was reverse-engineered by psychologists working within a joint Army and CIA command to become the Bush administration’s “enhanced interrogation methods.”

Early in the Senate report, we learn that the SERE program’s adaptation began with two senior military psychologists. In December 2001, Dr. James Mitchell, the senior SERE psychologist at the Pentagon’s Joint Personnel Recovery Agency, asked his former colleague Dr. John “Bruce” Jessen to review a recently obtained al Qaeda interrogation resistance training manual.

“The two psychologists reviewed the materials and generated a paper on al Qaeda resistance capabilities and countermeasures to defeat that resistance,” according to this heavily redacted section of the Senate report. Mitchell and Jessen became CIA interrogation consultants the next year.

In April of 2002, Jessen created an “exploitation draft plan” for Guantanamo detainees. According to this plan, Jessen would direct SERE training of interrogators at the “exploitation facility,” which would be “off limits to non-essential personnel.” The Senate report makes several references to changing conditions at Guantanamo whenever the International Committee of the Red Cross came to visit.

Eventually, the Cuban military base became known as a “Battle Lab for new interrogation techniques,” which were then applied at military prisons in Iraq and Afghanistan and at CIA detention centers.

Military and law enforcement professionals repeatedly warned against the application of SERE tactics, but the Senate report shows that their use was urged by top Bush administration figures eager to find information linking Al Qaeda and Iraq. (And it concludes that their use at Guantanamo Bay, authorized by Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld, led to the abuse of detainees there – as well as in Afghanistan and Iraq.)

The Senate report notes that SERE-based interrogation techniques were presented to Guantanamo personnel in September of 2002, despite the objections of instructors from Fort Bragg. In an interview with the Army’s Inspector General, Army psychiatrist Major Charles Burney said “interrogation tactics that rely on physical pressures or torture…do not tend to get you accurate information or reliable information.” According to Burney, instructors repeatedly stressed that harsh interrogations don’t work and that the information gleaned “is strongly likely to be false.”

Nonetheless, the SERE techniques came to be used by members of the newly created “Behavioral Science Consultation Teams” (BSCT), a joint operation of the Army and CIA. The first of those teams worked at Guantanamo.

The role of ‘safety officers’

The Senate report confirms the intimate involvement of health professionals in designing, supervising and implementing the Army and the CIA’s “enhanced” interrogation program. (The Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel memos, released April 16, revealed that medical professionals had served as “safety officers” during waterboarding and other interrogation sessions.)

Tactics used by psychologists and supervised by medical personnel clearly constituted torture and a grave breach of medical and professional ethics, according to both PHR and the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC).

In a February 2007 report made public earlier this year, the ICRC states that health professionals who participated in the interrogation process “constituted a gross breach of medical ethics” at times amounting to “participation in torture.”

“The monitoring of vital signs and giving instructions to interrogators to start and stop are some of the most severe abuses of the Hippocratic Oath and medical ethics imaginable,” says Nathanial Raymond, of PHR. “Strangely, the memos and the statements of former senior Bush Administration officials use the presence of medical professionals in contravention of their professional ethics as a defense, when it is in fact, itself, a crime.”

Steven Reisner, PHR’s adviser on psychological ethics, believes that U.S. psychologists were busy perpetrating torture even before Justice Department lawyers wrote their opinions justifying the interrogation practices.

“These individuals must not only face prosecution for breaking the law,” Reisner says. “They must lose their licenses for shaming their profession’s ethics.”

Debate among psychologists

The role of psychologists in torture became a hot issue within the American Psychological Association in 2005, when the board of the organization of mental health professionals endorsed psychologists’ role in interrogations as consistent with APA ethics, for the purpose of making it safe, legal and effective.

But a 2007 resolution of the APA membership proscribed member involvement in a number of interrogation tactics. Then, in 2008, the organization passed a further resolution against members’ presence at any facility where U.S. and international law was being violated, unless they were working for the benefit of the people held.

Prior to the 2008 APA resolution, Guantanamo’s public affairs office published an article in January 2008 describing the Behavioral Science Consultation Team as “integral” to the success of Guantanamo.

In that article, Army Colonel Larry James—a licensed psychologist and the director of Guantanamo’s Behavioral Science Consultation Team—says he feels validated by the APA’s approval (at its August 2007 convention) of psychologists working in military detention facilities.

“It’s clear given the vote at the APA convention that there is overwhelming support for psychologists who wear the uniform all around the world in defense of this nation,” James says.

“During my time here, I am proud to say that I have not seen a guard or interrogator abuse anyone in any shape or form,” he continues. The article reports that James worked with another licensed psychologist, a behavioral science specialist and leaders within the Joint Detention Group and the Joint Intelligence Group.

Push for accountability

Since 2005, PHR has been working to hold accountable health professionals it believes were complicit in torture. The APA “has never comprehensively addressed the troubling ethical entanglement of some members of its leadership in the intelligence apparatus,” PHR’s Sara Greenberg wrote Wednesday.

“In January 2005,” Greenberg writes,

the American Psychological Association issued its Report of the Presidential Task Force on Psychological Ethics and National Security, which seeks to legitimize the involvement of psychologists in interrogation; a role that is fundamentally inconsistent with ethical principles and both US and international law. In concluding that psychologists have a central role in interrogations, the Task Force gave short shrift to the ethical and human rights implications of coercive interrogation practices used by U.S. forces that relied on psychological expertise. Nor has the APA sanctioned its members responsible for designing and implementing torture.

PHR contrasts the APA’s flip-flopping with the unequivocal opposition to torture expressed by other leading organizations of health professionals, including the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association.

With the debate over how to hold Bush administration-era officials accountable for alleged torture now reaching a fever pitch, PHR spokespeople have fanned out in the media, calling for the psychologists who justified, designed and implemented the interrogation programs to lose their professional licenses and face criminal prosecution.

“The conclusion that these interrogation techniques cause no lasting harm is the equivalent of psychological malpractice,” Reisner recently told the Inter Press Service. “How can you compare U.S. soldiers who volunteered for SERE training, and could have stopped their interrogations at any time, with the effects on a prisoner who has been ‘disappeared,’ is in fear for his life, and believes he will never see his family again?”

~ Frederick Clarkson is a Massachusetts-based independent journalist. He is the editor, most recently, of Dispatches from the Religious Left: The Future of Faith and Politics in America (Ig Publishing, 2008).

Tags: Psychology, torture, Politics, ethics, Frederick Clarkson, In These Times, The Psychologists of Torture, APA, Physicians for Human Rights, Steven Reisner, Hippocratic Oath

AP - Former Gitmo Guard Reveals Extent of Abuse and Torture

This is a great - if highly disturbing - article from the AP. Here is a long piece of the article, Former Gitmo guard recalls abuse, climate of fear.

"If Guantanamo has taught us anything, it's the importance of abiding by the rule of law," said Jennifer Daskal, senior counterterrorism counsel for Human Rights Watch.

Or as [Army Pvt. Brandon] Neely put it in an interview with The Associated Press this week, "The stuff I did and the stuff I saw was just wrong."

Neely, a burly Texan who served for a year in Iraq after his six months at Guantanamo, received an honorable discharge last year, with the rank of specialist, and now works as a law enforcement officer in the Houston area. He is also president of the local chapter of Iraq Veterans Against the War.

An urge to tell his story led him to the University of California at Davis' Guantanamo Testimonials Project, an effort to document accounts of prisoner abuse. It includes public statements from three other former guards, but Neely was the first to grant researchers an interview. He also spoke extensively with the AP.

Testimony from the other guards echoes some of Neely's concerns. One of the other guards, Sean Baker, described in an interview with CBS' "60 Minutes" how he was beaten and hospitalized by fellow soldiers in a January 2003 training drill in which he wore an orange jumpsuit to play the role of a detainee.

Terry C. Holdbrooks Jr. told the Web site cageprisoners.com in an interview this month that he saw several abuses during his service at Guantanamo in 2003, including detainees subjected to cold temperatures and loud music, and he later converted to Islam.

Neely, 28, describes a litany of cruel treatment by his fellow soldiers, including beatings and humiliations he said were intended only to deliver physical or psychological pain.

A spokeswoman for the detention center, Navy Cmdr. Pauline Storum, said she could not comment on "what one individual may recall" from seven years ago. "Thousands of service members have honorably carried out their duties here in what is an arduous and scrutinized environment," she said.

Neely's account sheds new light on the early days of Guantanamo, where guards were hastily deployed in January 2002 and were soon confronted by men stumbling out of planes, shackled and wearing blackout goggles. They were held in chain-link cages and moved to more permanent structures three months later.

The soldiers, many of them still in their teens, had no detailed standard operating procedures and were taught hardly anything about the Geneva Conventions, which provide guidelines for humane treatment of prisoners of war, Neely said, though some learned about them on their own initiative.

"Most of us who had everyday contact with the detainees were really young," he said in the AP telephone interview.

Army Col. Bill Costello acknowledged that Guantanamo-specific procedures developed over time, but insisted that the guards had strict direction from the start. "This was a professional guard force," said Costello, who served as a Guantanamo spokesman during its first months and now speaks for the U.S. Southern Command in Miami, which oversees the base.

Only months had passed since the Sept. 11 attacks, and Neely said many of the guards wanted revenge. Especially before the first Red Cross visit, he said guards were seizing on any apparent infractions to "get some" by hurting the detainees. The soldiers' behavior seemed justified at the time, he said, because they were told "these are the worst terrorists in the world."

He said one medic punched a handcuffed prisoner in the face for refusing to swallow a liquid nutritional supplement, and another bragged about cruelly stretching a prisoner's torn muscles during what was supposed to be physical therapy treatments.

He said detainees were forced to submit to take showers and defecate into buckets in full view of female soldiers, against Islamic customs. When a detainee yelled an expletive at a female guard, he said a crew of soldiers beat the man up and held him down so that the woman could repeatedly strike him in the face.

Neely says he feels personally ashamed for how he treated that elderly detainee the first day. As he recalls it, the man made a movement to resist on his way to his cage, and he responded by shoving the shackled man headfirst to the ground, bruising and scraping his face. Other soldiers hog-tied him and left him in the sun for hours.

Only later did Neely learn — from another detainee — that the man had jerked away thinking he was about to be executed.

"I just felt horrible," Neely recalled.

Neely grew up in a military family in Huntsville, Texas, and said he initially saw the Army as a career. He says his experiences led him to see the treatment of detainees and the Iraq invasion as "morally wrong." He refused to return to active duty when called up from the Inactive Ready Reserves in 2007 and ignored repeated letters threatening penalties.

Neely acknowledged that by talking about his experiences, he also has broken the nondisclosure pledge he signed before leaving Guantanamo. He also says a lawyer told him the document he signed could not be enforced.

Read the whole article.

The Guantanamo Testimonials Project: http://humanrights.ucdavis.edu

Tags: AP, Gitmo Guard, Abuse, Torture, terrorism, culture, law, Islam, Iraq, war, Guantanamo, testimonials, Brandon Neely

Psychology and Torture

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Stanley Fish can be all over the place with his columns, but every once in a while he really nails it. This is NOT one of those times.

The APA never took a solid stand against aiding the Bush Administration with its torture agenda until this past September, and that, to me, is a crime. Psychologists are doctors and their first tenet should be the Hippocratic Oath - DO NO HARM. I don't care that some psychologists are behavioralists, a school of psychology that completely negates all interiority (inner and psychological life).

Fish contends, after a long argument, that applied psychology can never be clean, and cites psychological research used in marketing and sales, trial lawyers use of manipulation, and even the "good cop, bad cop" routine as evidence of its dirty hands.

Yeah, sure. But that is not in any way the same as torture. And most applied and experimental psychologist already know that torture seldom elicits anything more useful than a false confession to make the torture stop. Wouldn't you say whatever was necessary? John McCain did, which was why he opposed torture until the Bush mafia forced him to recant.

Torture is always morally indefensible to me, and it should have been to the APA as well.

November 9, 2008, 10:00 pm

Psychology and Torture

In late September, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to ban its members from participating in interrogations at United States detention centers, including Guantanamo Bay. Just a year earlier, the association had declined to take this action, but did pass a resolution listing a number of methods of interrogation -– sleep deprivation, sexual humiliation, exploitation of phobias, loud music, harsh lights and mock executions were examples –- with which psychologists should not be involved.

What the association did this September brought it into line with the positions of the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association, which declared in a May 2006 statement that “No psychiatrist should participate directly in the interrogation of person held by military or civilian investigative or law enforcement authorities.”

Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions? One answer can be found in the A.M.A.’s explanation of its prohibition: “Physicians must not conduct, directly participate in, or monitor an interrogation with an intent to intervene, because this undermines the physician’s role as healer.” The American Psychiatric Association is even more explicit: “Psychiatrists . . . owe their primary obligation to the well being of their patients.”

Psychology, on the other hand, is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists. It is their task to figure out how the mind processes and responds to stimuli, or how the emotions color and even create reality, or how reasoning and other cognitive activities are affected by changes in the environment. Their product is not mental health, but knowledge; their skills are not diagnostic, but analytic -– what makes someone do something -– and it is an open question as to whether there are limits, aside from the limits of legality, to the uses to which these skills might be put.

Are psychologists experts for hire, or is it understood, as a matter of professional self-definition, that their expertise is to be deployed only for benign purposes?

As a matter of fact, psychological skills are purchased and deployed as commodities all the time. Law firms employ jury consultants to assess the psychological make-up of prospective jurists and give advice about the appeals and emotional triggers that might sway (i.e., manipulate) them. Every viewer of “Law and Order” knows the good-cop-bad-cop routine, a strategy of interrogation designed to put suspects off balance and gain their confidence by creating a false sense of comradeship. Cable TV’s most popular heroine, Brenda Lee Johnson of “The Closer,” plays both roles herself. Large corporations employ psychological profilers to help make them make personnel decisions. Sports teams hire “coaches” whose job it is to motivate players and make them more aggressive. Hospitals use the results of psychological examinations to decide whether or not a patient should be released. And of course the military employs psychologists in an effort to identify techniques that lead prisoners to spill what they know.

Once could try to draw a line between those techniques that are coercive and those that are merely facilitative, but the line would always be arbitrary, as we can see from a directive put out by Donald Rumsfeld when he was Secretary of Defense: “Interrogations must always be planned deliberate actions that take into account a detainee’s emotional and physical strengths and weaknesses” and “manipulate the detainee’s emotions and weaknesses to gain his willing cooperation” (“Memorandum for the Commander, U.S. Southern Command,” 2003).

What could the word “willing” possibly mean here? It can’t mean “of his free will” because it is precisely the point of the “planned deliberate actions” Rumsfeld speaks of to bend, if not break, the will of detainees. “Willing cooperation,” if it is achieved, is a theatrically produced state and the opposite of the real thing. (If there is a real thing; there has always been an argument that human agents cannot freely will anything, but that is not an argument I want to take up today.)

In fact, the moment psychological knowledge of causes and effects is put into strategic action is the moment when psychology ceases to be a science and becomes an extension of someone’s agenda. Employing psychological skills in the course of any verbal interaction -– be it a domestic conversation, classroom teaching, a performance in a law court, or an interrogation -– will always have the effect of subordinating the facts and the truth of the matter to the desire for an outcome.

This is precisely the accusation traditionally made against the ancient discipline of which psychology is the heir -– rhetoric, or the art of persuasion. The earliest rhetorical manuals were handbooks for lawyers; they taught the tricks of the trade: how to make an argument, how to disguise the weakness of an argument; what to do when the facts are not on your side; how to turn a negative into a positive; how to modulate your voice; how to position your body; how to flatter, pander, intimidate and obfuscate; in short, how to play the jurors and the judge so that they will dance to your tune.

The emphasis is not on what is true, but on what works, what gets results even if the results are obtained by torture. If the testimony you are citing has been elicited by torture, just say that “it was in order to discover the truth that our ancestors wished to make use of torture” (”Rhetorica ad Herennium“). That is, first torture and then defend the practice with any argument that can give it “an appearance of plausibility.” Physical manipulation and verbal manipulation bleed into one another; they are only slightly different ways of clouding minds.

In his “Rhetoric,” Aristotle acknowledges that it would be better if we could make our case without either browbeating or flattering the audience; nothing should matter except “the bare facts.” Yet he laments, “other things affect the result considerably, owing to the defects of our hearers.” And since our hearers are defective it is incumbent upon us to suit our methods to those defects. The ancient art of rhetoric comes into being because men and women are susceptible to base appeals; that susceptibility has been mapped and scientifically described by the modern art of psychology.

Can those arts be defended? The classic defense of rhetoric is that the techniques it catalogs are themselves morally neutral; the enterprise should not be condemned because some people misuse it. In other words, we just supply the knowledge; what is done with it is someone else’s responsibility.

The American Psychological Association flirts with the same reasoning when it regards the transformation of psychological insights into devices of torture as an instance of crossing a line. But that line is crossed whenever the knowledge psychology yields as a science of the mind is made into the technology of persuasion. Applied psychology can never be clean.

Tags: Psychology and Torture, Stanley Fish, New York Times, APA, Psychology, torture, Politics, ethics, morality, American Psychological Association, Hippocratic Oath

"The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals" by Jane Meyer

This new book -- The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals by Jane Meyer -- is getting a lot of press. This may be the book for which many of us (who fear what the Bush administration has done to our nation) have been waiting.

Here is the an excerpt from the Washington Post:

Collateral Damage

According to Jane Mayer, the United States has succeeded in creating an American gulag.

Reviewed by Andrew J. Bacevich

Sunday, July 13, 2008; Page BW03

With the appearance of this very fine book, Hillary Clinton can claim a belated vindication of sorts: A right-wing conspiracy does indeed exist, although she misapprehended its scope and nature. The conspiracy is not vast and does not consist of Clinton-haters. It is small, secretive and made up chiefly of lawyers contemptuous of the Constitution and the rule of law.

In The Dark Side, Jane Mayer, a staff writer for the New Yorker, documents some of the ugliest allegations of wrongdoing charged against the Bush administration. Her achievement lies less in bringing new revelations to light than in weaving into a comprehensive narrative a story revealed elsewhere in bits and pieces. Recast as a series of indictments, the story Mayer tells goes like this: Since embarking upon its global war on terror, the United States has blatantly disregarded the Geneva Conventions. It has imprisoned suspects, including U.S. citizens, without charge, holding them indefinitely and denying them due process. It has created an American gulag in which thousands of detainees, including many innocent of any wrongdoing, have been subjected to ritual abuse and humiliation. It has delivered suspected terrorists into the hands of foreign torturers.

Under the guise of "enhanced interrogation techniques," it has succeeded, in Mayer's words, in "making torture the official law of the land in all but name." Further, it has done all these things as a direct result of policy decisions made at the highest levels of government.

To dismiss these as wild, anti-American ravings will not do. They are facts, which Mayer substantiates in persuasive detail, citing the testimony not of noted liberals like Noam Chomsky or Keith Olbermann but of military officers, intelligence professionals, "hard-line law-and-order stalwarts in the criminal justice system" and impeccably conservative Bush appointees who resisted the conspiracy from within the administration.

Above all, the story Mayer tells is one of fear and its exploitation.

That fear should trump concern for due process and indeed justice qualifies as a recurring phenomenon in American history. In 1919, government-stoked paranoia about radicalism produced the Red Scare. After Pearl Harbor, hysteria mixed with racism led to the confinement of some 110,000 Japanese Americans in internment camps. The onset of the Cold War triggered another panic, anxieties about a new communist threat giving rise to McCarthyism. In this sense, the response evoked by 9/11 looks a bit like déjà vu all over again: Frightened Americans, more worried about their own safety than someone else's civil liberties, allowed senior government officials to exploit a climate of fear.

Read the whole review.

Here's more from The American Prospect:

Mayer has been admittedly obsessed with the administration's detainee policy for years and knows how to piece together her own string and the hidden scraps that others have reported into a complete fabric.

The combination has led to perhaps the deepest and broadest chronology yet of the path from September 11 to the authorization of torture in the abstract -- including, she reports, gouging out eyeballs and "slitting an ear, nose, or lip, or in disabling a tongue or limb" -- to its implementation at black sites, Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, and in Afghanistan.

Mayer marshals much of her evidence against "Cheney's Cheney," David Addington, the vice president's counsel who replaced I. Lewis "Scooter" Libby as his chief of staff when he resigned amid his indictment. Addington is a sharp-elbowed right-wing ideologue vested in increasing the power of the executive over that of Congress and the courts. He was often the last person to see documents or executive orders before they went to the president and helped shape the crucial Office of Legal Counsel memos that justified torture and other executive encroachments. A longtime Cheney ally, he drafted a congressional report in the 1980s arguing that President Reagan was justified in funding the Nicaraguan Contras even though Congress had outlawed it.

Addington and Cheney's involvement in war crimes is teased throughout the book, as is, once a while, Bush's. A group of senior White House officials in 2005 put together a proposal they called the Big Bang. It would have shuttered Guantanamo and brought the United States back into conformity with international law. It died, but as Mayer writes, it "reached Bush, two sources said, proving that as of the summer of 2005, he knew there were senior officials inside his administration, including the deputy defense secretary, who thought the war on terror was being undermined by his detention policies, and that Guantanamo needed to be closed."

Mayer relates how Cheney and Addington were ultimately able to put down the rebellion within the White House, and today much remains as it was. In fending off the reformers, though, they have exposed themselves that much more to the judgment of history. The Impeach-Bush-Now crowd will not be disappointed by Mayer's research. And the administration may have exposed itself to more than just a historical verdict.

Read the whole article.

Read more reviews in The New York Observer, Pro Publica (read the first chapter), Slate, The LA Times, Salon, and Harpers.

This is an interview with Mayer at YouTube:

Dan Abrams talks to Jane Mayer author of the book The Dark Side which includes details such as some the torture techniques used at Guantanamo Bay, that the approval of those techniques went far up the chain of command in the Bush administration, and that James Comey and Jack Goldsmith were afraid they were in physical danger and being spied on.

I looked through more than 100 links on Google (and another 50 or so blog links) searching for a conservative take on this book, but they seem to be avoiding it like the plague.

Tags: Dan Abrams, Jane Mayer, Torture, Guantanamo Bay, James Comey, Jack Goldsmith, The Dark Side, Washington Post, American Prospect, Dick Cheney, George Bush, Alberto Gonzales, David Addington, 9/11, Politics, ethics, books, War on Terror

Watch Christopher Hitchens Get Waterboarded

Hitchens gets water-boarded and realizes that, yes, it is torture. Follow the link to watch the video. It looks pretty harmless, but he experienced as actual drowning, which no doubt is the point. Brave of him to do that.

His aftermath feelings have all the symptoms of mild PTSD, and that was after only a few seconds. Imagine months of that, with no information to give over. Who wouldn't make shit up just to make it end?

All those innocent men and boys who were turned in by their neighbors for the cash will suffer years of residual effects from this, all in the effort to find the one or two detainees who actually know something. Torture needs to be banned.

The author catches his breath after undergoing his first waterboarding session. Photographs by Gasper Tringale.

Believe Me, It’s Torture

What more can be added to the debate over U.S. interrogation methods, and whether waterboarding is torture? Try firsthand experience. The author undergoes the controversial drowning technique, at the hands of men who once trained American soldiers to resist—not inflict—it.

by Christopher Hitchens, August 2008

Here is the most chilling way I can find of stating the matter. Until recently, “waterboarding” was something that Americans did to other Americans. It was inflicted, and endured, by those members of the Special Forces who underwent the advanced form of training known as sere (Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape). In these harsh exercises, brave men and women were introduced to the sorts of barbarism that they might expect to meet at the hands of a lawless foe who disregarded the Geneva Conventions. But it was something that Americans were being trained to resist, not to inflict.

Exploring this narrow but deep distinction, on a gorgeous day last May I found myself deep in the hill country of western North Carolina, preparing to be surprised by a team of extremely hardened veterans who had confronted their country’s enemies in highly arduous terrain all over the world. They knew about everything from unarmed combat to enhanced interrogation and, in exchange for anonymity, were going to show me as nearly as possible what real waterboarding might be like.

View a video of Hitchens’s waterboarding experience.

It goes without saying that I knew I could stop the process at any time, and that when it was all over I would be released into happy daylight rather than returned to a darkened cell. But it’s been well said that cowards die many times before their deaths, and it was difficult for me to completely forget the clause in the contract of indemnification that I had signed. This document (written by one who knew) stated revealingly:

“Water boarding” is a potentially dangerous activity in which the participant can receive serious and permanent (physical, emotional and psychological) injuries and even death, including injuries and death due to the respiratory and neurological systems of the body.

As the agreement went on to say, there would be safeguards provided “during the ‘water boarding’ process, however, these measures may fail and even if they work properly they may not prevent Hitchens from experiencing serious injury or death.”

Read the rest of Hitchen's article.

Tags: Christopher Hitchens, Water Boarding, torture, Vanity Fair, politics, PTSD, Geneva Conventions, interrogation