… now this may sound convoluted, but not if one tracks the cultural response of hostility from every passionate point of view when a leadership itself is so prone to unjustifiable violence and un-American diminishment of the constitution. What do you think is going to happen? What do you think the American hopeless will do…? We better consider what the fundamentalist within will put on our table…

This quote is from Sean Penn speaking last August in Denver, CO at a rally to open the presidential debates to “third parties” and independent candidates. This excerpt was part of Penn’s attempt at foreshadowing how violence could become the last line of defense against a corrupt government and debased political process that is devoid of substantive democratic debate and participation.

“Shooter”

Last Thursday afternoon at the initial press conference regarding the Fort Hood shooting, it would take General Cole over a minute – and a check of his notes — to quickly and begrudgingly clarify that “the shooter was a soldier”. To be fair, this was probably a difficult and embarrassing admission for the General; indeed, the reservation, disbelief, and shock that embodied the General’s speech and demeanor during this press conference smacked of genuine surprise and exigent circumstances as opposed to premeditated, administrative misdirection. Linguist John McWhorter has noted that the pervasive and grammatically incorrect use of the term “troops” to identify individual soldiers killed or sent to war is impersonal and demeaning; additionally, he states that “using a name for soldiers that has no singular form grants us a certain cozy distance from the grievous reality of war”. Nidal Hasan as “shooter”, and not the more accurate, descriptive, and clear “soldier”, further decouples the actions of the Major from the appropriate military context and pushes it into the realm of inexplicable civilian criminality.

Shock

The real shock of last Thursday’s events is that they were much of a shock at all. There was the justifiable visceral shock of individuals having to emotionally internalize and absorb this act of brutal violence and murder; on the other hand, there was a larger, needless, abhorrent, and dishonest intellectual shock and morally-bankrupt flight to fantasy used by individual actors within our reified mainstream media to explain the day’s events. This faux shock took the form of prejudiced, irresponsible, and sadistic language, images, and fabrications designed to cover-up our society’s colossal failures of military aggression (i.e., global war on terrorism), soldier care and protection, and American democracy as a whole. One General using the term “shooter” to allay the cognitive dissonance associated with his soldier’s behavior is perhaps understandable. The corporate-crafted-elite-friendly news coverage provided a nefarious distraction from the more obvious and likely motives, context, and factual circumstances of the event. The media projected the collective guilt and ramifications of this nation’s larger war ethos and bloodlust onto this “shooter” in an attempt to further ameliorate the discontent of the citizenry brought on by a duplicitous permanent war economy.

The Media

Last Thursday’s media spectacle unfolded as a disgusting montage of avoidance and denial. Prior to General Cole’s initial address to the media, TV news outlets focused on the more improbable and far-fetched scenario that outside actors penetrated the base to carry out an attack — stories and questions abound about lax and inadequate security measures, permeable gates, etc. The focus was traditional “terrorists”, like the ones we’re supposedly fighting overseas, or homegrown “domestic terrorists”. Though not impossible causes, given the type, breadth, and scope of operations of Fort Hood (soldier returning and debarking centers, psychological services, etc.), the media conveniently discounted the likely scenario that a soldier(s) instigated the attacks and instead focused on terrorist perpetrators working from the outside-in. Even after the General’s announcement that this was soldier-on-soldier violence, the language of the media did not embrace the basic facts — we continued to see “suspect”, “shooter”, the very convenient and oft-used “lone gunman”, and more problematic “Muslim” splash across our screens. Hasan was no longer a soldier — perhaps a justified, if not trite and childish redaction of a murderer’s factual stature – but now was part of a possible “sleeper cell” or domestic terrorist conspiracy. No evidence abound to substantiate these theories, but reiterating the factual scenario that this was an apparently stable, accomplished, and respected American soldier turned murderer had to be avoided — it begged the larger questions and challenged America’s narcissistic mores. Any factual and empirical analysis of context, one that could actually occur in the absence of the more tactical facts of that day, was avoided in deference to further innuendo and speculation. The potential spectacle of terrorism would be much more useful to state-corporate power than a humiliating analysis of America’s global military folly coming home to roost with devastating consequences.

The real story was not broached in deference to the morbid advertisement of the body count, a sadistic drive to understand the killer’s exact path through the buildings, how he managed to fire so many rounds, trite detail about where his handguns originated from, etc. The true thrust of the story should have been that the act was committed by a soldier, and why? Predictably, the only suitable means for the media to address this fact was not on the public policy level, but exclusively on the private level of neoliberal tenets: personal responsibility and individual pathology: What, literally, was wrong with Hasan’s brain? What about his personal life and religion? Why didn’t he have a wife? Why did he require psychological counseling? Did he not relate well to others? Was he exposed to interpersonal discrimination because he was a Muslim? Etc.

The media conveniently ignored the prescient questions and relevant policy issues that could have been informed by military experience and empirical fact. A more appropriate and probative line of questioning and investigation might have gone as follows: What is the prevalence of violence, murder, and/or other antisocial/self-destructive behavior among soldiers and veterans to our recent wars? Under what conditions and why have similar acts occurred — how have we addressed them? What drives other soldiers to resist deployment? What is fueling the soldiers’ and veterans’ record levels of domestic abuse, divorce, suicide, substance abuse, unemployment, poverty, bankruptcy, homelessness etc? What do the difficulties of our enlisted soldiers and veterans tell us about our war efforts? What ramifications of our wars could inspire such violent behavior? Does military violence overseas beget violence at home — how? Do civilian casualties of war inspire soldiers and others to commit crimes? Are soldiers empowered with a constructive way to stop civilian casualties within their work scope and operating procedures? Are objecting soldiers encouraged to leave active duty? Can soldiers object or opt-out of war and still maintain their military livelihood? Are soldiers helpless, powerless, disempowered, and driven to violence because they have no means to prevent their duplicity in unjust wars? Are foreign soldiers and civilians respected by our military? Are war crimes prosecuted adequately? Are appropriate reparations consistently granted to innocent civilians affected by our wars? Can soldiers be heard and bring charges against military personnel without retribution? Are military strategies coherent, defensive in nature, and do they have a moral and ethical foundation? Is military strategy and justification understood along the chain of command — is soldier input considered and valued? Is conscientious objector status too onerous? The military knows the wars are unpopular at home, abroad, and with soldiers — why weren’t they prepared? Shouldn’t this act have been expected? What does this say about our war efforts? Some of these questions seem naive, even after the killings, given the nature of the military and our pernicious appetite for invading; however, if they were seriously considered in the past, maybe we wouldn’t be counting the dead at Fort Hood.

The vile and cruel nature of the media was further evidenced by the impugning of Hasan’s reported history of psychological counseling. A simple sound bite in the news let viewers know what the proper cultural attitude should be: seeking psychological help is a sign of weakness; worst yet, by implication, it is a precursor to murderous rage. Major Hasan became a double-whammy of weakness: not only did he seek psychological counseling, but he inflicted it on other soldiers and thereby facilitated the weakness and stigmatization of his fellow soldiers. The hypocrisy of this media teaching is overwhelming. How many of the media-dubbed “heroes” killed by Hasan had sought psychological counseling due to their exposure to warfare? This malignant labeling by the media is akin to calling a soldier who seeks mental health support a “ticking time bomb” or “sleeper cell agent”. More importantly, it devalued the ongoing importance of mental health services in the military and diminished the level of cultural caring for those who suffer psychologically.

Similar correlations (i.e., not causality) were mangled in a prejudiced attempt to impugn Muslims. When soldier-on-soldier violence is between Caucasian parties of strong Christian faith, we don’t start investigating the perpetrator’s church and reverend as a source of motive. America’s imperialist wars disproportionately affect followers of Islam. It is common sense that many Muslims are resistors to our empire; however, the implication by the media that there is something inherent to being a Muslim that drives anti-American and antiwar sentiment is false. This assertion is only useful in a propaganda system designed to demean and devalue our enemies, to make those affected by aggression more disposable and invisible, and divert attention from the human toll of state terrorism.

The inconvenient truth is the deplorable act committed by Major Hasan cannot be a shock because we knew it was coming; in fact, it was foreseeable, unavoidable, and inevitable to a moral certitude. It takes no leap of imagination to understand this act as a predictable outcome of criminal wars of aggression, torture, and indifference to the slaughter and displacement of foreign peoples under the guise of freedom, democracy, and the market. The tragedy at Fort Hood represents a failure of the ubiquitous rotten soul shared by our major political parties — a soul that throws taxpayer capital and the weight of corporate campaign contributions behind the projection of American power and empire. Contrary to the current state of our nation’s maniacal foreign policy denial, the “liberated” foreign recipients of American interventionism are not disposable or invisible — Major Hasan’s mass murder was a simple violent inversion of our military expansionism. Last Thursday, in the absence of the more or less trivial, private, and logistical facts surrounding Major Hasan’s actions, our country’s blatant criminal indifference to the ramifications of expansive foreign policy is what truly informed the events of the day. If we disregard the media delving further into the sadistic and titillating spectacle of details — along with its use of discriminatory deflection masquerading as informed speculation — our focus could have been narrowed to the scant but significant known facts at the time: an apparently successful and otherwise stable American soldier had turned on his fellow soldiers in cold blood. The context in which to evaluate such an act is painfully obvious, empirical support abounds, and analogous events involving soldiers were readily available to use as a lens to understand Major Hasan’s actions. They were all discarded because of their common thread: what they tell us about war and how it affects people.

Scribd

The mangling of language surrounding Hasan was best evidenced by the yet unproven attribution of a Scribd comment to him regarding suicide bombings. Whether Hasan is the author is beside the point because the quote was used in a very real way by the media as disinformation, propaganda, and distraction. The quote was never addressed or explained in its full context; additionally, selective text and interpretation of the full post was leveraged by the media to create a false impression of equivalency. Omissions played on our nation’s larger cultural pedagogy of fear. Here is text of the full post:

NidalHasan scribbled: There was a grenade thrown amongs a group of American soldiers. One of the soldiers, feeling that it was to late for everyone to flee jumped on the grave with the intention of saving his comrades. Indeed he saved them. He inentionally took his life (suicide) for a noble cause i.e. saving the lives of his soldier. To say that this soldier committed suicide is inappropriate. Its more appropriate to say he is a brave hero that sacrificed his life for a more noble cause. Scholars have paralled this to suicide bombers whose intention, by sacrificing their lives, is to help save Muslims by killing enemy soldiers. If one suicide bomber can kill 100 enemy soldiers because they were caught off guard that would be considered a strategic victory. Their intention is not to die because of some despair. The same can be said for the Kamikazees in Japan. They died (via crashing their planes into ships) to kill the enemies for the homeland. You can call them crazy i you want but their act was not one of suicide that is despised by Islam. So the scholars main point is that “IT SEEMS AS THOUGH YOUR INTENTION IS THE MAIN ISSUE” and Allah (SWT) knows best.

What is immediately clear is that this is not in any sense a direct, first person equivocation of suicide bombing with a soldier sacrificing his own life to save his comrades. This is clearly a man using metaphor and real life examples to explain another man’s writing and interpretation of Islam relative to suicide and what are contemporaneously called suicide bombers. At any rate, this is hardly a direct endorsement of suicide bombing; additionally, neither example used in the post reference the killing of civilians.

Let’s take what the media intended to construe after they mangled, circumscribed, quoted out of context, and generally reshaped the meaning of this post: an American soldier throwing oneself on a grenade to save fellow soldiers is equivalent to a suicide bomber. We all know “suicide bomber” in western-corporate-media parlance means killing civilians. The media’s assertion is obviously true: throwing oneself on a grenade to save your fellow soldiers is in no way morally equivalent to preemptively killing civilians.

However, consider the following quote given that the civilian “kill ratio” of American drone bombings inside Pakistan have been reported by the Brookings Institution to be 90% (9 civilians are killed for every 1 “terrorist”) and perhaps much higher according to other sources:

      They tellin’ you to never worry about the future
      They tellin’ you to never worry about the torture
      They tellin’ you that you’ll never see the horror
      Spend it all today and we will bill you tomorrow
      Three piece suits and bank accounts in Bahamas
      Wall Street crime will never send you to the slammer
      Tell all the children in the arms of their mammas
      The F-15 is a homicide bomber

      – “Yell Fire!,” Michael Franti & Spearhead, 2006

So, how is our “homicide bomber” different from Hasan’s purportedly righteous suicide bomber? They aren’t — they are both the same: morally repugnant and based on the vacuous logic of preventive killing. This kind of preemptive, criminal murder is sanctioned and largely unquestioned US policy — the kind committed by our enemies is condemned. Moral equivocations that do not justify American empire are outside the spectrum of what is considered polite, acceptable political discourse. Perhaps our version is just more cowardly, as the bomber is not eviscerated in the cause and doesn’t become a martyr. Our bomber sits behind a computer, maybe flies a plane hopped-up on amphetamines, and is always in some manner detached enough (physically and psychically) from the act to confer continued legitimacy on the act’s criminal planners. The inevitable “collateral damage”, as it is repeated over time, is not aptly designated as state terrorism — it becomes an Orwellian “accident”. This is the policy of our President; a man Libertarian Christopher Dowd has called a “criminal sociopath” for labeling our misadventures in Iraq as an “extraordinary achievement”, among other things. Obama is the “Teflon Don” behind the uniquely American version of the suicide bomber: he is instant judge, jury, and executioner. He is a recidivist homicide bomber who will remain legally infallible until the civic imagination and courage of his countrymen put an end to his run.

Leadership

A cogent and fact-based analysis of the effects of unjust war on the health and attitudes of soldiers was lost on our “leadership” as well. It is indeed shocking to have to digest the mind-numbing hypocrisy of a President decrying “a horrific outburst of violence”, while he is on the verge of sending tens of thousands more “troops” to a bottomless pit of US-sponsored death and despair in the Middle East. Obama’s impending “surge” of violence and manpower in his “war of necessity” is of course acceptable when conducted by our corporate-imperial state. The results of this brand of leadership are as predictable as the events of last Thursday: more acts of criminal violence justified as legitimate resistance by the powerless, more budding jihadists overseas, and hundreds of thousands more innocent women and children slaughtered on foreign soil. Shocking is the deviousness of a leader willing to minimize the ramifications of bankrupt imperial hubris — his logic of preventive war and empire, through its own weight and internal logic, collapsing inward and consuming itself along with the victims at Fort Hood.

Our leaders are well aware of the bubbling undercurrent of rage and resistance regarding our unjust wars and the disproportionate-to-rank physical, mental, and moral toll it places on soldiers; they know all the reasons for the discontent of their “troops”; and they know that soldiers are disempowered, discouraged, punished, and stigmatized for speaking-out or seeking help. In doing absolutely nothing of significance to rein in our criminal wars, they are responsible to forestall the foreseeable violence that will be enlisted by soldiers who feels powerless, overwhelmed, and boxed-in, a la Major Hasan. They abrogated this responsibility and have yet to offer anything but puffery and palliative solutions when it comes to soldier discontent and preventing inevitable soldier-on-soldier violence.

Our President, oft dubbed a brilliant orator, didn’t manage to mention soldier-on-soldier violence during his initial remarks last Thursday at a Tribal Nations Conference. Instead, he opened with several minutes of inane rambling that included a mislabeled “shout out” to “Congressional Medal of Honor” winner Dr. Joseph Medicine Crow before vaguely addressing the situation at Fort Hood (Crow was award the civilian Medal of Freedom). Obama’s performance was eerily reminiscent of George Bush Jr.’s Booker Elementary fiasco on the morning of 9/11.

The President’s weekly radio address on Saturday was another dilatory exercise that reeked of distraction: Hasan, not mentioned directly, remained a “shooter”. Obama let us know that any painful exploration and reexamination of the unintended consequences of our war machine was off-the-table — preemptively. Obama divined: “We cannot fully know what leads a man to do such a thing.” No — but we are obligated to explore all causes, including the ones that lie beyond the waters-edge of personal responsibility, deviance, and unintelligible rage and murder. We also can’t brush aside the unpleasant, blatant, and searing facts staring us in the face — the ones that blind us from reality and conveniently remain outside the acceptable spectrum of American political discourse.

The suicidal and Pyrrhic forces unleashed as a result of 9/11 need to be addressed in the light of day, as part of a broader, civic self-examination of our nation. This seems to be a moral and ethical exploration that Obama is unwilling or incapable of leading. Obama’s real constituents, like campaign benefactor turned government-sponsored enterprise Morgan Stanley, announced in a report published that day after his election that “…Obama has been advised and agrees that there is no peace dividend…” Indeed, the opportunity costs of the daily outbursts of violence, suffered by citizens of all corners of the globe where US forces are deployed, could never be enumerated by a financial-sector sycophant such as Obama. Fort Hood is just another “no peace dividend” event to Barack. Torture, rendition, indefinite detention, criminal indifference to the suffering of civilians overseas — all these are a slap in the face to soldiers. Sending soldiers to unjust wars and letting them reap the whirlwind of consequences is an abrogation of leadership. Kowtowing to corporate leaches whose single-minded pursuit of profits, no matter the cost to the earth and mankind, does not instill hope. Change is accomplished by addressing the real twin deficits of our supposedly participatory democracy: corporate power and empire.

The second casualty of war: imagination

The events at Fort Hood were a massive security breakdown, not on scale but of type with 9/11; in fact, it was a double failure that we couldn’t protect the soldiers from harm at home, nor ensure the mental “security” of the very people entrusted to maintain the psychological well-being of soldiers. This fact represents a complete abject failure of military and civilian leadership at the highest levels: they know the havoc and despair we (as an imperialist nation) are heaping-on foreigners overseas; they know we are indiscriminately killing, displacing, or impoverishing millions in the Middle East; they know that our “accidents” and apologies do not justify criminal murder and fail to meet the standards of international law; they know that US military might is destroying any real hope and opportunities for change available to generations of Iraqi, Afghani, and Pakistani youth; they know that we are torturing, rendering, and denying basic human rights; they know we treat global justice and the sovereignty of nations with scorn; they know all these things — but most importantly — they know we know. Only arrogant denial and lack of caring on behalf of our leaders explain this security failure; that is the shock. This double failure of security merely informs a larger double failure and interdependency of our foreign and domestic policies: our imperial devastation overseas (killing civilians, spurring more budding jihadist, etc.) can only be driven by domestic degradation (police states, inadequate care for soldiers and veterans, civic disenfranchisement, economic exploitation, etc.)

We, as a society, can’t continue to pervert language and sideline the public-private linkages that drive the human cost of war to incalculable levels. We can’t continue to deny Hasan is an American Soldier, a Major, and our native son, just because he turned against our “wars of necessity”. He chose a deplorable and bankrupt path that mimics his own country’s policy of preventive executions and homicide bombings. Apparently we can’t handle this truth; it has to be terrorism and radical Islam; we’re unable to pray for his soul or our own. We can’t imagine the asymmetrical moral horror and evil that is our “extraordinary achievement” in Iraq, our continuously rebranded “Af/Pak” policy, and all our other malevolent “overseas contingency operations”. We can’t continue to avert our eyes from the private suffering of human beings due to these public policy failures.

Much needed and accessible democratic outlets don’t seem to exist in Obama’s corporatized worldview. As Chris Hedges has noted, moral autonomy and political agency are under attack; the results of which are docility and pacification, but also bouts of unfocused, unproductive, and abnormal rage, violence and desperation. Our morbid government-corporate alliance can’t continue to kill with impunity overseas, unleash a police state on the homeland, enslave the majority of Americans to neoliberal scraps from the economic table, and feign shock when homegrown resistance occurs in a radicalized form. Our leaders can’t ignore sane advice and expect peace — consider the following from a Rand Corporation report published last year titled “How Terrorist Groups End — Lessons for Countering al Qaida”:

Military force has rarely been the primary reason for the end of terrorist groups… and military force led to the end of terrorist groups in 7 percent of the cases… The evidence by 2008 suggested that the U.S. strategy was not successful in undermining al Qa’ida’s capabilities… Al Qa’ida has been involved in more terrorist attacks since September 11, 2001, than it was during its prior history.

In terms of recommendations, here is some of the language:

First, policing and intelligence should be the backbone of U.S. efforts… This means a light U.S. military footprint or none at all. The U.S. military can play a critical role in building indigenous capacity but should generally resist being drawn into combat operations in Muslim societies, since its presence is likely to increase terrorist recruitment.

As far as the thrust of last Thursday’s events, Nidal Hasan was a soldier who turned on his comrades with whom he spent years trying to ensure their psychological wellbeing given the theaters of war in which they operated. Why? Perhaps time will tell, but the private travails and motives of Hasan can’t be decoupled from the larger public policy issues and context that inform his actions.

Our myopic cultural obsession with terrorism forestalls antiwar debate and consideration of the trauma of war; it blinds us from recognizing that peace should be considered, weighed, and debated as an alternative. Peace has become devoid of value, delegitimized, and undeserving of human caring and championing. It has been stripped of cultural fit in a society constantly under the siege of fear; it has lost credibility in the neoliberal-friendly “emergency time” posited by Henry Giroux. Collectively, citizens must find a way to discuss Major Hasan’s action not only as a possible stress response, but as a misguided antiwar statement of a powerless man, in a hallowed-out democracy, that is increasingly devoid of personal political agency and power sharing. Explanation, understand, and cause should not be trumped by the fear of “justification” when a legitimate concern is expressed inappropriately. Murder is the desperate flight to fantasy of a “shooter” — why it became the only instrumentality left for a US citizen and soldier requires a pragmatic and realistic investigation of motive, not one moored in a fantasyland of “freedom-hating” Muslims and terrorists.

As a country, we can’t deny our self-destruction masked in the pride of nationalist glory and “justifiable” vengeance. Every soldier sent, every civilian killed, and every dollar spent is just another step in our own ruination, in service of a corporate-military agenda, against a much ballyhooed “evil” enemy. We don’t understand our real enemies, and we do not dare, lest we approach “justification” of their “terrorist” resistance to US military might. We disregard the legitimate concerns of Hasan and our enemies abroad, and they need do nothing but sit back and watch us self destruct as we “spread freedom” around the globe. “Preventive”, “preemptive”: both words mean pre-fact and pre-cause, and result in unjustified criminal violence and aggression. Our military’s self-ascribed omniscient, predictive, and existential abilities do not jive with the realities of the world.

The needs of capital are a critical player in the circle of violence that enveloped the life of Major Hasan and Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate capital has become the means to its own ends via a publicly subsidized-for-profit-private militia that operates in tandem with the US military overseas. Opening markets by bringing “democracy” to unwilling foreign recipients dovetails perfectly with the needs of capital. In this sense, our county’s wanton, international excesses are inextricably linked to our domestic moral deficits. Our recent historical transfer of wealth upward, regressive tax cuts, corporate bailouts, a business paradigm of growth (profits) at any extrinsic cost, etc. –the preconditions and funding of these capital-friendly events can only be achieved by the exploitation and gutting of the welfare state, the social contract, and any social safety net.

For us citizens, this neoliberal umbrellas means more Hasan-like events, police states, privatization, crushing military expenditures, debt peonage, media consolidation, etc. and a blind eye to the suffering of our youth, soldiers, veterans, children, and all those that can’t survive in America’s high-stakes game of state capitalism. The constitution is shred and we are left to cleanup the carnage at Fort Hood. The circle is completed with the debasement of representative government via “regulatory capture”, the “revolving door” between the government and private sectors, and a complete debasement of the electoral process by corporate campaign contributions. Politicians are corrupted and left to engage in what Ralph Nader has called “the politics of avoidance” when explaining events like those that took place at Fort Hood last Thursday. Corporate-imperial leaders, the needs of capital, and overflowing campaign coffers demand continuous war at the reciprocal expense of social justice and real political, economic, and cultural “safety”.

How much more debased and perverted can our war language become? It isn’t just convenient that our enemies lack state affiliation and sponsorship — our culture has embraced and internalized the impersonal language that denies the human dignity of our enemies: “combatants”, “insurgents”, “detainees”, “terrorists”, “extremists”, etc. None of this misdirection changes the fact that our disrespect for them and de-legitimization of their resistance is evidenced in the same lack of care and security we afford our soldiers — both our “terrorists” and theirs are caught up in the same dehumanizing and destructive US imperial drive.

The prisoner had been forced into pink women’s panties, lipstick and a wig; the men then pinned the prisoner to the floor in an effort “to outfit him with the matching pink nightgown.” As he recounts in his memoir, Fixing Hell, Dr. James initially chose not to respond. He “opened [his] thermos, poured a cup of coffee, and watched the episode play out, hoping it would take a better turn and not wanting to interfere without good reason…”

Although he claims to eventually find “good reason” to intervene, the Army colonel never reported the incident or even so much as reprimanded men who had engaged in activities that constituted war crimes.

Sadly, the story of Dr. James’ complicity in prisoner abuse does not end there. The New Orleans native and former LSU psychology professor admits to overseeing the detention, interrogation and health care of three boys, aged twelve to fourteen, who were disappeared to Guantanamo and held without charge or access to counsel or their families. In Fixing Hell and elsewhere, Dr. James proudly proclaims that he was in a position of authority at Guantanamo.

Government records indicate that, as the senior psychologist consulting on interrogations, his decisions affected the policy and operations of interrogations and detention on the base. During his time there, reports of beatings, sexual abuse, religious humiliation and sleep deprivation during interrogations were widespread, and draconian isolation was official policy. Prisoners suffered, and some continue to suffer, devastating physical and psychological harm.

Dr. Trudy Bond, a psychologist under an ethical obligation to report abuse by other psychologists, filed a complaint against Dr. James before the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists in February 2008.

Dr. Bond’s complaint says that Dr. James’ conduct violated Louisiana laws governing his psychology license. As a psychologist and military colonel, he had a duty to avoid harm, to protect confidential information, and to obtain informed consent, as well as to prevent and punish the misconduct of his subordinates.

How did the Louisiana licensing board respond? Rather than investigate, the Board dismissed the complaint, and when asked again, reaffirmed its decision. Dr. Bond has now taken the case to the Louisiana First Circuit Court of Appeal in Baton Rouge.

Dr. James played an influential role in both the policy and day-to-day operations of interrogations and detention in the notorious prison camps built to hold men and boys captured during the U.S. “War on Terror.”

According to his own statements, he was a senior member of interrogation consulting teams that, as documented by government records, were central in designing interrogation plans that exploited psychological and physical weaknesses of individual detainees. In one example cited by the New York Times, a military health professional told interrogators that “the detainee’s medical files showed he had a severe phobia of the dark and suggested ways in which that could be manipulated to induce him to cooperate.”

Had Dr. James chosen to cast himself as a brave, but ultimately ineffective voice against torture, he may have fooled some people into believing him. Instead, he’s presented an utterly implausible portrait: one of a man “chosen” by “the nation” to “fix the hell” of Guantanamo and Abu Ghraib, a feat he claims to have accomplished so successfully that ever since he was first deployed in January 2003, “where ever [sic] we have had psychologists no abuses have been reported.” This is patently untrue. The real “fact of the matter,” as documented by government records, reports from the International Committee of the Red Cross and eyewitness accounts, is that serious abuses were widespread both during Dr. James’ tenure as senior psychologist for the Joint Intelligence Group at Guantánamo, and after he left.

One would imagine that such disregard for a law designed to protect the public welfare would greatly concern the body charged with its enforcement. But the Louisiana State Board of Examiners of Psychologists, which issued James his license, has refused to investigate whether he violated professional misconduct law.

The Board’s conduct should alarm all Louisiana health professionals and their patients. The Board demeans the profession when it fails to seriously address the possibility that a Louisiana licensee was involved in torture. It also strips the Louisiana psychology license of meaning and value. How can patients rely on a license issued and enforced by a body that arbitrarily refuses to look into allegations of grave misconduct?

As the legal battle wears on, the people of Louisiana need to ask the Board’s members what “good reason” they await in order to act. They should demand that the Board of Examiners conduct a thorough investigation of Larry James and, if what he admits is true, revoke his privilege to practice.

Blogs that responded to the essay contain some interesting comments. Many bloggers blame poor parenting for the shootings. Many others describe a deep sense of compassion for Susan and show a greater level of understanding of the human condition.

Life can be complicated. Dave Pelzer is author of A Child Called It. He has never demonstrated any anti-social behavior. It appears that as a child, he was the victim of extreme abuse.

On the other hand, it appears that Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber, had a normal, loving childhood. His brother, David, is a highly respected member of the community. They grew up in the same home. The causes of criminal/ anti-social behavior are complex and not completely understood.

There can be no greater pain than the death of a child, except maybe having a son who kills others and then himself. Susan Klebold is now a member of a very exclusive club of parents and other family members who have suffered that extreme horror. The family of the Virginia Tech Shooter, the mother and brother of the Unabomber, and many others have a loved one who has murdered. They are too often held responsible for the crimes of their loved ones. How much responsibility do these family members have for the actions of the offender? None – they are not to blame. They, too, are innocent victims. Often they had no way of predicting the criminal act. Sometimes, even if the family had recognized warning signs, they still could not have prevented the horrific act. HIPA and other limits in our health care system act as roadblocks to mental health care. The Virginia Tech shooter had a history of counseling for mental health problems. Parents often are not given access to the student’s academic records, let alone health records.

We have morphed into a culture of blame-the-other-guy. I didn’t mean to do it. It was a mistake. The dog ate my homework. My wife doesn’t understand me. My husband doesn’t pay enough attention to me. Buyer beware. My mother didn’t love me enough. My father didn’t talk to me enough. It was just a campaign promise. The media lied to me. Everybody else is doing it. The bad economy made me enlist. I was just following orders.

Wall Street Bankers hoard a large portion of the national wealth and blame it on their compensation boards. Congress has written the legislation that allows such greed. The members of Congress blame the lobbyists. The lobbyists say they are just doing their job. The voters say that they have been misled by the media. The media says that they have to put ratings first. We are witnessing the death of personal responsibility.

Capitalism is a big contributor to the problem; but, voters do not have to vote for capitalists. On my ballot there were eight candidates for president, plus a write-in option. Voting has consequences. Uninformed voting has disastrous consequences. Voters say blame someone else. They say that they do not have time to research the issues. An uninformed voter is dangerous and should stay home on election day. It is better to not vote at all, than to cast an uninformed ballot and cancel the vote of someone who has studied the issues.

The lack of personal responsibility and compassion are blocking real health care reform. We need Reform School for the compassionless. The every-man-for-himself culture was especially evident during the health care town meetings. It was common to hear comments such as, “I am insured – the hell with everybody else”. Raise-the-drawbridge syndrome — I am safe and you don’t count.

A pervasive lack of personal responsibility exists in local and national governments – also as a business model in the corporate world. Decisions are often made by committee in order to distance one from any singular responsibility. Temporary Experts are often hired for the sole purpose of relieving others from the consequences of a decision. Passing the buck has become a national pastime. It’s enough to make one wish for the end of the government system as we know it — to be replaced by a Benevolent Monarchy. No more hiding behind Experts and committee group decisions.

The culture of the Internet is not helping. Bloggers usually prefer anonymity when dropping comments. Why the failure to accept responsibility for the comment left on the blog? The civility of the blogosphere would be greatly improved if everyone gave an honest identification.

The brain is an organ – in some ways like a pancreas or a liver. It is affected by genetics, age, drugs, the environment, electrical currents, illness, and an unknown number of other influences. Where should the line between evil and madness be drawn? And who should make that determination?

Psychiatrists will continue to debate the ability of a patient to make ethical judgments. Philosophers will continue to debate Free Will versus Determinism. Lawyers will continue to argue for the guilt or innocence of the accused; but, the simple fact is that a society which is organized on any principle that does not include personal responsibility will not work.

The bottom line is that everyone must be held responsible for their own actions, and no one should ever be held responsible for the acts of another. What a revolutionary concept.

News reports are filled with senseless acts of violence. Today’s report is about a group of teens who set a 15 year old boy on fire and then laughed as they watched him burn. We must do better. We must find a way to develop empathy and compassion. The teens who set the fire must be held accountable for their act. You and I, as members of society, must be held responsible for the culture of violence that disables the youthful conscience.

Susan Klebold should be held responsible, and maybe praised, for her parenting. She should never be held responsible for the acts of Dylan.

I am not speaking of simple irrationality; although such strangeness rides irrationality as a surfer might ride a wave. This is beyond irrationality: this is the human capacity trying to work in a design and with “responsibilities” well beyond its powers. We could think of movies where a ‘primitive’ is thrust into the present. We have, small step by small step, made the details of our world in such a way that they integrate into a whole that is beyond our comprehension and our powers of adaptation. We are all ‘Encino Man.’

Economists are struggling to understand and, in some way, control a global process of exchange that has grown to become like the energy economy of a rainforest in which only 5% of the species are even identified much less known in any comprehensive way. These people are very smart and yet, ultimately, they are seen to fall back on ideological prejudgments: the conflicts and dueling pronouncements are really statements of largely unfounded belief. Such situations lead only to the opportunism of personal aggrandizement and gain, and not to rational options for whole communities living more successfully in integration in an ecosystem.

I have long felt this strangeness because of training in the standards of biological integration and adaptation. Actions that remove from the universe thousands of species integrated into adapting ecosystems, remove millions of biochemical systems that have evolved through the same processes, over the same immense time, actions that remove these things without the slightest awareness, are incomprehensible. They are exceedingly strange. But there has been a quantum leap in the presentation of strangeness; it requires no special sensitivity or training for its recognition.

I spend a great deal of time with “children” (14 to 18) who are fighting the strangeness, fighting the upsets and uncertainties of their days. The strangeness has left them without a solid surface to build their lives on.

The transition years have always been difficult – the transition from protected childhood to responsible adult. Our ancestors had a solution to this change: a child observed, as he or she grew into pubescence, the behaviors of adults and at a point, decided by tradition, was initiated into the next stage with ceremonies and specific instruction. After such an initiation the child was then a baby-adult, just as he or she had been, at their beginning, a baby-child. A degree of certainty surrounded these human lives like water surrounds a coral reef.

The children I spend time with, for the most part, are overwhelmed by the strangeness and uncertainty that pervades their every moment. They don’t believe anyone or anything and thus contribute to another layer of strangeness. Adaptation for them is an impermanent process of the moment laid over a desperate desire for stability, safety and a future that they can count on – precisely the qualities of life they are denied. And in a dramatic act of strangeness they come to believe in commercial advertising, celebrity and subculture reality.

That they select these things as a reliable source for reality is not in itself strange at all: a large part of the economic world is devoting considerable energy to create just such a platform from which to communicate, sell to and control these children. What is exceedingly strange is that the so-called adult world has allowed its children to be stolen – Pied Piper fashion – from them. But these children are not secreted away behind a cleft in a rock, but are there in front of us, just beyond our comprehension; a condition, they have been told, that is good for them. Our youth and what they will become, what they will do with the increasingly complex world using their decreasingly effective education, is another strange conundrum. It adds to the sense of weightlessness.

The adults, those grown into full size and needing some job to sustain themselves, are barely adult-like in the sense of competent practitioners of the human way. The strangeness settling over them leaves them angry and frightened; uncertain and grasping for the hand-up offered by religion, militancy or materialism, or by almost anything that will seem to let them see a bit of acceptable future through the strangeness.

The world has grasped for Obama to clear away the uncertainty, the lies, the terrible incomprehensibility; yet this only adds to the strangeness. We want our leaders to make sensible decisions; we want them to make our world safe and understandable. But leaders haven’t done that since we lived in small nomadic communities. Leaders have for thousands of years struggled against the grounding reality; their power only comes from the illusions of their followers. It is this that has finally resulted in whole populations living in ungrounded strangeness. It is left to us to find our way through the strangeness, to find the grounding structures in our lives.

I seem always to find my way back to this place. Either I have little imagination or this is, like the bottom of one of those spiraling coin funnels used for charity donations, the final destination for our efforts. We are turned back on our own resources, and they have to be enough. Ultimately, we must accept that the strangeness is not a condition that we can make sense of and thereby overcome or correct. It is the product of billions of individual actions disconnected from reality coming more and more each day into collision with each other and reality. The consequences seem strange and overwhelming because they are; and they are not to be made sense of. Sense is to be made of our own lives and our daily contact with The Real. The trick is to discover what that is. It is a first step, at least, to know what not to consider.

But look for a pharma affiliation for the author of the article “Preschool Depression,” Joan L. Luby, MD in the August issue and you’ll be told no “financial disclosure” was reported. Not that “Dr. Luby has received grant/research support from Janssen, has given occasional talks sponsored by AstraZeneca, and has served as a consultant for Shire Pharmaceutical,” as a 2006 article in Journal of the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry says.

Even though the pharmaceutical industry has got 27 million Americans on antidepressants thanks to direct to consumer advertising–ten percent of the population–it is looking for depression in preschoolers. And guess what?

It’s finding it!

It’s easy to make jokes about “preschool depression”–students get it every time the alarm rings–but finding depression, “relapses,” “chronicity” and “treatment resistance” in three-year-olds is not funny.

Researchers used to believe that “young children were too cognitively and emotionally immature to experience depressive effects,” says Luby but now believe they can and do suffer from Major Depressive Disorder (MDD).

“The potential public health importance of identification of preschool MDD is underscored by the established unique efficacy of early intervention during the preschool period in other childhood disorders,” says Luby. “Based in part on the recurrent course and the relative treatment resistance of childhood MDD, there has been increased interest in the identification of the disorder at the earliest possible stage of development.”

Translation: they want to screen your kid.

The case for a new social problem to be called preschool depression is so strong, there was only one real wrinkle in Ludy’s longitudinal study of 304 preschoolers, funded by our tax dollars at the National Institute of Mental Health.

Instead of having “anxiety disorders” usually associated other MDD sufferers, the three and four-year-olds had “disruptive disorders.” Possibly Play-Doh problems.

Undaunted, Luby says the preschoolers need to be screened for impending mental illness because their disruptive behavior “might be associated with social impairment and peer rejection that lead to later MDD.”

Of course cynics will point out that drinking milk also predicts MDD and that disruptive behavior is the definition of a preschooler, making terms like preschool “social impairment and peer rejection” laughable academic babble.

But more concerning is what, exactly, is the “treatment” and “intervention” for the at-risk preschooler who might develop depression? And why the hurry?

Is it treatment with Janssen and AstraZenca antipsychotic drugs in which case the MDD is really a Risperdal or Seroquel deficiency?

Like Rebecca Riley given Seroquel at two and dead at four?

And the late Destiny Hager who was given Seroquel at three?

Is the “intervention” like the two children the Miami Herald says Mirko and Regina Ceska of Crawfordville, FLA adopted from state foster care who were so doped up on antipsychotics the couple asked Gov. Charlie Crist if “chemical restraints” were “prerequisites” in foster care?

Only to have Crist’s head of the Department of Children and Families, George Sheldon, ask them to testify at the investigation into the death of foster care seven-year-old, Gabriel Myers, earlier this year, on similar drugs?

It is not a coincidence that 3,100 or 15.5 percent of the Florida’s 20,000 children in state care are on psychoactive drugs, legally prescribed or not, a figure that likely applies to other states.

Do you think private plans will pay $900 a month per patient for a branded blockbuster drug that may not even be necessary?

No wonder pharma sits in so many “advisory positions” on state formularies, tampering with drug decision algorithms.

In fact, Texas charged Janssen in December with defrauding the state of millions “with their sophisticated and fraudulent marketing scheme,” to “secure a spot for the drug, Risperdal, on the state’s Medicaid preferred drug list and on controversial medical protocols that determine which drugs are given to adults and children in state custody.”

In addition to giving trips, perks and kickbacks to Texas’ mental health officials, says the Dallas News, Janssen disguised marketing tools as scientific research “including ‘independent’ articles that were nothing of the kind.”

Imagine that.

The Israeli Medical Association (IMA) has ignored repeated requests to examine such evidence, the rights groups say, even though it has been presented with examples of Israeli doctors who have broken their legal and ethical duty towards Palestinians in their care.

The accusations will add fuel to a campaign backed by hundreds of doctors from around the world to force Yoram Blachar, who heads the IMA, to step down from his recent appointment as president of the World Medical Association (WMA).

More than 700 doctors have signed a petition arguing that Dr. Blachar has disqualified himself from leadership of the WMA, the profession’s governing ethical body, by effectively condoning torture in Israel.

The campaign against Dr. Blachar has gained ground rapidly since his appointment as president in November. Critics said his alleged complicity in the use of torture in Israeli detention facilities could be traced to 1995, when he became chairman of the IMA.

Until 1999, when Israel’s Supreme Court restricted torture, Israeli doctors routinely supervised the medical treatment of abused detainees, mostly Palestinians from the occupied territories.

During that period Dr. Blachar surprised many colleagues by expressing support for Israeli interrogators’ use of “moderate physical pressure” in a letter to The Lancet, the British medical journal. The phrase covers a wide range of practices from beatings and binding prisoners in painful positions to sleep deprivation. It is regarded by human rights organizations as a euphemism for torture.

Despite the 1999 court ruling, a coalition of 14 Israeli human rights groups known as United Against Torture concluded in its latest annual report in November that Israeli detention facilities are still using torture systematically. Israeli doctors are also being relied on to treat the resulting injuries.

Last week, Physicians for Human Rights and the Public Committee against Torture in Israel published a joint report examining hundreds of arrests in which Palestinians were bound in “distorted and unnatural” ways to inflict “pain and humiliation” amounting to torture.

The report noted instances where prisoners, including a pregnant woman and a dying man, were shackled while doctors carried out emergency procedures in a hospital.

According to the report, the doctors violated the Tokyo Declaration, the key code of medical ethics adopted by the WMA in 1975 that bans the use of cruel, humiliating or inhuman treatment by physicians.

Ishai Menuchin, the head of the Public Committee, said his group had been lobbying strenuously against Israeli doctors’ complicity in torture since it issued a report, Ticking Bombs, in 2007, arguing that torture was routine in Israel.

The Public Committee highlighted the testimonies of nine Palestinians who had been tortured by interrogators. The report also noted that in most cases Israeli physicians treating detainees “return their patients to additional rounds of torture, and remain silent”.

In June last year, Physicians for Human Rights drew the IMA’s attention to two cases in which the attending doctor failed to report signs of torture on a Palestinian.

Anat Litvin of Physicians for Human Rights told the IMA: “We believe that doctors are used by torturers as a safety net — take them out of the system and torture will be much more difficult to enact.”

The groups stepped up their pressure in February, writing to Avinoam Reches, the chairman of the IMA’s ethics committee. They demanded that his association investigate six cases of doctors who failed to report signs of torture.

In one case, a prison doctor, under pressure from interrogators, agreed to retract a written recommendation that a detainee be immediately hospitalized for treatment.

Prof. Reches promised to conduct an inquiry. However, last month the two human rights groups criticized him for failing to investigate their claims, accusing him of holding only “amicable and unofficial” conversations over the phone with a few of the doctors concerned.

“We have sent to the IMA many testimonies from victims of torture who were referred to doctors for treatment,” Dr. Menuchin said. “But the IMA has yet to do anything about it.

“A significant number of doctors in Israel, in detention facilities and public hospitals, know torture is taking place, but choose to avert their gaze.”

This month, Defense for Children International issued a report on the torture of Palestinian children, noting that in several of the cases it cited, Israeli doctors had turned a blind eye. A boy of 14 who was beaten repeatedly on a broken arm reported the abuse to a doctor who, he said, replied only: “I had nothing to do with that.”

The report stated that the group “has not encountered a single case where an adult in a position of authority, such as a soldier, doctor, judicial officer or prison staff, has intervened on behalf of a child who was mistreated.”

Campaigners against Dr. Blachar’s appointment as the head of the WMA say its Israeli sister association’s inaction on torture is unsurprising given its chairman’s public stance.

Derek Summerfield of the Institute of Psychiatry at King’s College London, said: “The IMA under Dr. Blachar is in collusion with the Israeli state policy of torture. Its role is to put a benign face on the occupation.”

Dr. Blachar told the Israeli website Ynet last week that such criticisms were “slanderous”, saying he and the IMA denounced all forms of torture.

The WMA, with nine million members in more than 80 countries, was established in 1947 as a response to the abuses sanctioned by German and Japanese doctors during the Second World War.

In 2007, the WMA’s general assembly called on doctors to document and report all cases of suspected torture.

The APA letter follows years of reports that psychologists designed, helped conduct, disseminated, and legitimated the use of abusive interrogation techniques carried out under the Bush administration. While other health professional organizations adopted policies prohibiting their members participation in interrogations at Guantanamo, CIA “black sites,” and elsewhere, the APA stood alone in claiming, against evidence, that psychologists’ presence at the detention sites was necessary “to protect” detainees. In fact, the APA went further, allowing psychologists involved in these very interrogations to design APA ethical policy on interrogations.

Although recent revelations, including a Senate Armed Services Report, have debunked the claim that psychologists were preventing torture, the APA leadership still refuses to acknowledge the extent of the harm psychologists have done. Nor does it propose adequate steps to address past abuses by psychologists or to prevent psychologists from contributing to future abuse. The organizations’ statement ‘calls for the APA to take five immediate steps to begin this process of corrective action. Among these steps are a call for an independent body to pursue accountability for psychologists found to be involved in torture or abusive interrogation practices, and further, for an independent investigation of possible collusion between the APA and the military/intelligence establishment that may have contributed to the APA’s polices in this area.

***********

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
June 29. 2009

CONTACT:
Stephen Soldz
ssoldz@bgsp.edu

Open Letter in Response to
the American Psychological Association Board

On June 18, 2009, the American Psychological Association [APA] Board issued an Open Letter on the subject of psychologists’ involvement in abusive national security interrogations. The letter is among the first formal acknowledgements from APA leadership that psychologists were involved in torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. We welcome this progress.

Similarly, the letter acknowledges APA’s member-initiated referendum prohibiting psychologist participation in detention centers that are in violation of international law and overturning APA Council’s repeated refusals to do so. This is an improvement over very recent messages from APA officials that characterized press descriptions of APA policy as supporting psychologist participation in such interrogations as “fair and balanced.”

Nevertheless, the letter is profoundly disappointing. It continues the long tradition of APA leaders minimizing the extent of psychologists’ involvement in state-sanctioned abuse as well as APA’s own defense of such involvement. The authors speak as though the information about psychologist’s involvement in torture is fresh news even though it has been available for a long time. Even now, the Board relies on the Bush Administration tactic, employed in the Abu Ghraib debacle, of blaming the abuse on a “few bad apples.” This minimization of the greatest ethical crisis in our profession’s history by those who claim to lead the profession is unacceptable. Similarly the APA Board continues to take no responsibility for its own grievous mismanagement of this issue. Instead, the tone of the letter suggests we should all come together and “reflect and learn,” because this has been difficult for all of us, collectively. The Board also presumes the authority to continue to speak for psychologists in the future with neither redress nor evidence of remediation for what they have done:

This has been a painful time for the association and one that offers an opportunity to reflect and learn from our experiences over the last five years. APA will continue to speak forcefully in further communicating our policies against torture and other cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment or punishment to our members, the Obama administration, Congress, and the general public. [Board letter, June 18, 2009.]

Any meaningful approach to this issue must start by acknowledging the fact that psychologists were absolutely integral to our government’s systematic program of torture. When the Bush administration decided to engage in torture, they turned to psychologists from the military’s SERE [Survival, Evasion, resistance, and Escape] program for help in designing and implementing the torture tactics. This fact was first reported in 2005, within days of the release of the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] report and was officially acknowledged by the Defense Department in its Inspector General’s Report, declassified in May 2007. Other psychologists monitored torture to calibrate how much abuse a detainee could tolerate without dying. Nonetheless, APA leaders continued, and still continue, to pretend that psychologists’ participation in abuse was the behavior of rogue members of the profession.

Similarly, the APA Board still refuses to acknowledge the evidence of apparent collusion between APA officials and the national security apparatus in providing ethical cover for psychologists’ participation in detainee abuse. This collusion was most notable in the creation of the military-dominated PENS task force. Only a policy that comes to terms with this APA collusion can begin to reduce the furor among APA members, psychologists, and the general public.

APA leadership has much work ahead to begin to repair the harm they have caused to the profession, the country, former and current detainees and their families. At a minimum the APA leadership should do the following:

1. Fully implement the 2008 referendum as an enforceable section of the APA Code of Ethics. This entails a public announcement that APA policy and ethical standards oppose the service of psychologists in detention facilities at Guantanamo Bay Detention Camp, Bagram Air Base, CIA secret prisons, or in the rendition program.

2. Annul the June 2005 PENS Report due to the severe and multiple conflicts of interest involved in its production.

3. Bring in an independent body of investigative attorneys to pursue accountability for psychologists who participated in or otherwise contributed to torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment. APA should also: (a) clarify the status of open ethics cases and (b) remove the statute of limitations for violations involving torture or cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment, so as to allow time for information on classified activities to become public.

4. Develop a clear and rapid timetable to remove Sections 1.02 and 1.03 [the "Nuremberg defense" of following orders] from the APA Code of Ethics. [We note that the APA Ethics Committee has stated that they will not accept a defense of following orders to complaints regarding torture; this statement is a welcome improvement but it is clearly inadequate as it is not necessarily binding on future committees nor does it cover abuses falling under the category of cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment.] Revoke the equally problematic Section 8.05 of the Code, which dispenses with informed consent “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations,” and Section 8.07, which sets an unacceptably high threshold of “severe emotional distress” for not using deception in the ethics of research design.

5. Retain an independent investigatory organization to study organizational behavior at APA. Due to potential conflicts of interest, independent human rights organizations should be enlisted to select this investigatory entity. The study should address, among other things, possible collusion in the PENS process and the 2003 APA-CIA-Rand conference on the Science of Deception, attended by the CIA’s apparent designers of their torture program [James Mitchell and Bruce Jessen] during which “enhanced interrogation” techniques were discussed. The study should explore how the APA governance system permits the accumulation of power in the hands of a very small number of individuals who are unresponsive to the general membership. It should also propose measures to return the APA to democratic principles, scientific integrity, and beneficence, including restructuring for greater transparency and the assimilation of diverse viewpoints.

These five steps will not remove the terrible stain on the reputation of American psychology. However, by taking these steps the APA leadership would make both symbolic and substantive progress toward accountability for psychologists’ contributions to detainee abuse and the APA’s failure to adequately respond to the public record. These actions would constitute an important step toward rehabilitating the Association and restoring the good name of the profession itself.

Signed by:

Coalition for an Ethical Psychology

Physicians for Human Rights

Psychologists for Social Responsibility

Center for Constitutional Rights

Bill of Rights Defense Committee

Network of Spiritual Progressives

National Lawyers Guild

Amnesty International USA

Program for Torture Victims, Los Angeles

American Friends Service Committee, Pacific Southwest Region

Physicians for Social Responsibility, Los Angeles

Massachusetts Campaign Against Torture (MACAT)

New York Campaign Against Torture (NYCAT)

We continued this way for I don’t know how many meters, and soon I couldn’t hear anyone behind me, only a murmur that might have been distant voices ahead. Each point of light held the promise of hot sun and desert air, but each time I arrived to find only more tunnel, and a hand imploring me to follow deeper.

Soon my legs were burning with wanting to stand. It became so dark in the long lapses between electric lights that my guide had to take my hand as we felt our way along. So many times I said “Khalas” — I have seen enough. But at each light he would signal that it was just a little further.

Finally, I was finished. I could not remember why I had followed, and why I had continued to follow. I’d lost track of how many lights we’d passed, and had no idea how far the journey back would be. My guide pointed to a light maybe 8 meters ahead, and this light was different. Brighter, and more yellow. I knew this time we’d almost reached our destination, perhaps the end of the tunnel and the relative freedom of Egyptian sun and sand, but I couldn’t continue. “Khalas,” I said, and this time he knew I meant it. I turned and began to feel my way back.

Soon I was tearing through the tunnel, tripping over the uneven floor and scratching my fingers on the packed dirt and sand of the walls. Craggy sections of the ceiling tore at my hijab but I would not slow. My guide grabbed my hips to steady me and force a more even pace, and so I dragged him with me. Finally he pulled me to my knees inside one of the occasional wooden box frames supporting the more than 20 feet of packed sand and dirt above us. He sat down next to me and pushed his open palms up through the air in front of his chest and then down, showing me how to breathe. “Shway,” he said, “slow.”

Nearly everyone I’ve talked to in Gaza has told me that the effects of the siege and the massacre have been worst for women and children and I believe them, but seven meters below the rubble of Rafah and the rumbling of the tractors that push this endless sand away from the mouth of each new tunnel, my thoughts turn to Gaza’s men.

The guide kneeling beside me, and thousands like him, cheat death every day in these tunnels as they journey back and forth between Rafah, Egypt and Rafah, Gaza, one city divided by a border and a cruel siege. And nearly every day, at least one of these men loses his gamble and does not come home. The siege has kept out everything but a painfully short list of humanitarian items. Building materials, a wide variety of foodstuffs, ink and paper, and so many other necessities are not permitted to enter Gaza. If the people of Gaza are to have anything close to a life, to bathe and eat and rebuild and learn, they must purchase this contraband illegally, and someone must illegally import it.

The Israeli government claims that the tunnels must be bombed because they are used to smuggle weapons, but in reality the tunnels are almost always used for anything but. After the massacre the tunnels brought lions and tigers to replace the ones loosed by the attack on Gaza’s largest zoo (Can you imagine? Amid all the bombing and chaos, wild animals running through the streets of Gaza!) Many people have told me the next big project is to smuggle in cars, a necessity in a place where virtually every vehicle is subject to regular breakdowns.

The tunnels provide a necessary lifeline for the people of Gaza, but as my guide patiently awaited the end of my panic attack, I began to realize that they are born out of another necessity: The tunnels offer an opportunity for men to reclaim their place as protectors and providers in a society where occupation and siege make those roles virtually impossible.

A few days earlier, Palestinian psychiatrist Eyad Sarraj told me of a game he plays with his young nephew called “Arab and Jew.” In the game, his nephew would play a Palestinian, chasing Dr. Sarraj around the yard and pretending to throw rocks at him. Not long ago, they played the game again, but this time his nephew insisted on playing the Israeli. Shortly into the game the small boy leapt onto his uncle’s back and began to beat him as hard as he could. Once Dr. Sarraj was able to escape his nephew’s brutal attack, he immediately asked his sister about the change in her son’s behavior. She told him that the child had recently witnessed his father humiliated and severely beaten by Israeli soldiers. Dr. Sarraj tells this anecdote to illustrate a growing trend he’s seen in young Palestinians: As parents, especially fathers, are humiliated, beaten, arrested, and otherwise disempowered in front of their children by Israeli soldiers, they lose their status as protectors in their children’s eyes. Desperate for signs of strength in terrifyingly unstable and dangerous times, young Palestinians find a new role model: the Israeli soldier.

Dr. Sarraj finds the origin of this trend in the Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948, when Israelis began ethnically cleansing Palestinians from their land. Since 1948, the trauma of losing agency over one’s life and living conditions has become, in the words of Dr. Sarraj, “a part of the Palestinian psyche.” This trauma, which has grown with every violent incursion into Palestinian communities, strongly intensified with the first Intifada in 1987, when Israeli soldiers mercilessly beat children armed only with rocks, and also beat and arrested their parents. The psychiatrist notes that many of these children grew up to embrace more violent weapons in the second Intifada in 2000, a response to the brutal abuse and humiliation they’d witnessed. More than 45% of Palestinian children have watched Israeli soldiers beat and/or arrest their fathers, and the trend Dr. Sarraj describes has grown exponentially since the December/January massacre. Since the attacks, more than 75% of the youth of Gaza do not believe their parents can protect them from Israeli soldiers. Surrounded by the rubble of schools, hospitals, and whole neighborhoods, and with virtually no hope of employment upon graduation (the siege-induced unemployment rate is 80%), it is hard for the youth of Gaza to envision much of a future. And it is virtually impossible for their parents, highly educated but lacking agency and employment, to give them hope.

The trauma that is now part of the Palestinian psyche, that forces Palestinian youth to seek the new role model of the Israeli soldier, can be seen at its worst when these children grow up. Dr. Sarraj tells another story from a brief detention in a Palestinian prison. In the cell next to his, he heard a Palestinian guard interrogating a prisoner. The guard’s voice became louder and more frantic as his anger grew, until he began screaming at the prisoner in Hebrew. Dr. Sarraj later learned that the guard had been severely tortured in an Israeli prison. In this moment of uncontrollable anger, the guard became his tormentor.

Stories like these are all too frequent in Gaza, where weddings and graduations are celebrated with a soundtrack of constant Israeli bombing and shelling. My own such story came on a beautiful afternoon on the beach, while eating lunch with a large family. One of the older sons, maybe in his late teens, asked me to follow him to a small tent tucked behind the rows of family tents facing the Mediterranean. The son sat me down at a cheap metal table that had been transformed into a desk, decorated with a poster of young men murdered by Israelis, a couple of notebooks, and a mug holding some pens and a small Hamas flag. The man seated behind the desk and surrounded by young boys anxiously awaiting their next task made it clear that he would interrogate me, and sent one of the boys to find an interpreter on the beach. The son who had brought me beamed at my side, occasionally picking up the Coke my interrogator had presented me, encouraging me to drink more. After about ten minutes my interpreter arrived, another boy in his late teens. My interrogator spoke in a serious voice, but his questions were the same as those I’d received from students and families, curious about my country, a source of so much fascination and suffering for the people of Gaza. “What do Americans think of Palestinians? Who do Americans blame for the ‘war’ in December and January? What does American media say about the people of Gaza, and about Palestinians? What do Americans think of Bush? What will Obama do differently?” Throughout my “interrogation” I could not distract myself from the image of this authority figure, digging his toes into the sand, surrounded by a volunteer staff of young boys, protecting the beach by investigating a camera-toting foreigner from behind his make-shift desk and small Hamas flag.

This story is not representative of my experiences with Hamas. I do not know my interrogator’s official role within the government, if he actually has one, and I expect that the members of Hamas who were tasked with protecting and providing for our delegation would have been angered to learn of my unauthorized interrogation, an inconvenience they would have spared me. But this story stays with me because of the trauma Dr. Sarraj describes, which was palpable long before he described it to me. In detaining and interrogating a foreigner whose American passport can take her anywhere in the world and could have rescued her from the December/January massacre, this man momentarily seized his agency. In front of his young, eager audience, he claimed his place as their protector.

The phenomenon Dr. Sarraj illustrates is not only visible in individuals. One need only look at the devastated building of the Hamas-led Palestinian Legislative Council (PLC) to see the Israelis’ humiliation and abuse on a governmental scale. Of all of the destroyed buildings I’ve seen in Gaza, in some ways this one haunts me most. These walls housed a democratically elected government that has endured a vicious siege since 2006, fought off an attempted coup, and has struggled with great patience and flexibility to be seen as legitimate by the global community. All of these pressures combined are enough to destroy a government, but they are magnified exponentially by the horrific massacre that stole the lives of more than 1,400 Palestinians and forced the PLC to meet in a tent behind their largely collapsed building. I think often of the meetings held in this vulnerable tent: I wonder if sometimes the pressures bearing down on these legislators simply become too much, and they are unable to breathe, to force their words out into the hot air of a Gaza parking lot.

Just as the task of protecting and providing for one’s children in Gaza is nearly impossible, the task of Hamas to fulfill the role of protector and provider for 1.5 million people is truly Herculean. Every day the leaders of this government wake up to regular attacks from one of the best-funded militaries in the world and a global misrepresentation as a terrorist organization that took power by force. Because of the horrific Israeli siege Hamas cannot provide rebuilding materials to the people of Gaza, or even feed the people who voted them into power based on the party’s history of providing necessary social services to the Gaza community. The vast majority of food aid that reaches Gaza comes from the United Nations Relief and Works Agency (UNRWA), tasked with caring for Gaza’s refugees (80% of the population). While UNRWA supplies vital necessities to the slowly starving people of Gaza, their presence is a constant reminder of what Hamas cannot provide. It would be a lie to say that Hamas is loved by everyone in Gaza. But every action for which Hamas is condemned by western media must be understood in the context of the inhuman Israeli occupation and ethnic cleansing, which have become so commonplace and expected we sometimes forget they exist. With the siege, their complicity in the attempted coup, and the December/January massacre, the Israeli government has stolen the agency of the government the people of Gaza chose.

While Dr. Sarraj’s explanation of the societal effects of trauma explains so much about my interactions in Gaza, about the youth who only want to be photographed pretending to shoot guns at my camera and the gaming centers whose violent advertisements are omnipresent on Gaza’s city streets, the brilliant professor and one-state activist Haidar Eid makes an important counterpoint to Dr. Sarraj’s theory. While Dr. Eid agrees with much of what the psychiatrist describes, he insists that by attributing every action Palestinians take to Israeli-induced trauma, one steals the last ounce of agency Palestinians have. When Palestinians take up arms against their occupiers, or smuggle food and tigers through tunnels, they resist the inhuman Israeli occupation and reclaim some of their agency. As a Palestinian soldier told a delegation member, “What else are we supposed to do? We cannot sit by when they come to kill our families. We have to protect them.”

It has been more than 12 hours since I left the tunnel, and I still can’t catch my breath. Dusty walls of packed earth occupy my eyelids, and whenever I near sleep the walls begin to crumble. When we finally neared the tunnel entrance and I could see real, natural light maybe 15 meters away, we heard a distant rumble. Bombs dropped from Israeli planes perhaps, or a partial tunnel collapse somewhere, or more mechanical digging. All of these things happen almost every day in Rafah, and then there are the near-daily silent threats, like the poisonous gas the Egyptian military releases into tunnel entrances before permanently sealing them. As I scrambled out of the narrow tunnel passage and into the loop of rope that would pull me up to the surface and back to a reality where my American passport and some patience guarantee my safe passage across the Rafah border, I watched my guide shrink below me, before ducking back into the bend of the tunnel and resuming his daily routine.

PCHR reviewed IDF killing of Gaza’s children since the beginning of the Second Intifada in September 2000, then focused on the 313 youth deaths during the recent conflict. Its evidence comes from eye-witness accounts of the willful targeting of civilians, including women and children. Also covered are the psychological scars and “alarming scale of physical injuries” leaving some children blind and many others (as well as adults) permanently disabled by the loss of limbs and psychological trauma.

PCHR’s report bears testimony to Israel’s contempt for international laws, its imperial agenda, culture of violence, disdain for peace, genocidal intentions, disparagement of Arabs and Islam, and its scorn for Palestinian lives and welfare.

PCHR presented 13 case studies in its report. Briefly discussed below, they represent a small fraction of the many hundreds killed and thousands more grievously harmed.

Introduction

Since the September 2000 Second Intifada, Israeli forces killed 1179 children, including 865 in Gaza as part of a decades-long policy of collectively punishing millions of Palestinians in the Occupied Territories, mostly civilian men, women, and children.

Israel calls self-defense “terrorism” and justifies its actions as responses to militant missile or other attacks. PCHR’s investigations “have consistently undermined these claims,” and condemns all killing, especially of children.

In September 2006, the London Independent’s Donald Macintyre headlined his story: “Gaza: The children killed in a war the world doesn’t want to know about.” He wrote about more than 37 children under 18 killed since June 25 during Israel’s Operation Summer Rain, according to PCHR figures, out of an overall 228 total, mostly civilians.

He highlighted a “forgotten war in the Middle East” with young boys, girls and adults blown apart by Israeli shells and missiles, but who notices. He said the IDF attacks heavily populated areas indiscriminately on the pretext of fighting a “terrorist infrastructure.” He stressed that “attention (was) diverted from Gaza as Israel launch(ed) a full military invasion of southern Lebanon” yet civilian deaths mounted in both areas. He listed by name Gazan children under 18 killed and by what means — from airstrikes, while playing football, missiles, shrapnel, tank or artillery shells, and shot in the head or chest at close range. Khitam Mohammed Rebhi Tayey was one — age 11. Aya Salmeya another — age 9.

Israel rarely responds to public outrage or investigates its crimes, including against children. The few times it does turn into whitewashes. After 11 days on March 30, 2009, military advocate general Avichai Mandelblit closed the IDF’s inquiry into Israeli soldiers’ accounts of Operation Cast Lead crimes and dismissed them as unfounded.

International Humanitarian Law (IHL) Protection for Children

Various laws apply, including the Fourth Geneva Convention and UN Convention on the Rights of the Child (CRC). As protected persons, they’re to be safeguarded against willful killing, coercion, corporal punishments, torture, collective penalties and reprisals.

CRC was the first legally binding international instrument incorporating all human rights for children, including civil, cultural, economic, political and social. They’re now universally agreed on non-negotiable standards and obligations supporting their rights.

CRC’s Optional Protocol on the Involvement of Children in Armed Conflict took effect on February 12, 2002. Israel ratified it on July 18, 2005 and CRC in 1991. The Optional Protocol strengthens children’s rights, recognizes that they require special protection, and condemns their being targeted in armed conflicts, especially in schools, hospitals or at home. Israel is legally bound under both laws and Geneva, yet disdains them repeatedly, especially by “willful killing” through indiscriminate attacks or deliberately targeting civilian areas or structures.

Truth and Lies: Operation Cast Lead and Civilian Deaths

Besides vast destruction and mass population displacement, 313 children were killed among the 1414 who died over a 23-day period. Of the 5300 injured (many seriously), 1606 were children. In all cases, the vast majority were noncombatants.

Of the children killed:

• most were at home or nearby;
• around one-third were girls and the rest boys;
• almost 15% were under age 5 and another one-fourth between 5 and 10;
• the remainder were between 11 and 17;
• the “overwhelming majority” were killed in densely populated residential areas;
• 46% were killed in northern Gaza;
• 38% in Gaza City;
• 9% in Khan Yunis and Rafah and 7% in less densely populated areas.

Israel used conventional and illegal weapons. The former included missiles, artillery and tank shells, mortars, and automatic weapons.

Others included:

• white phosphorous that burns flesh to the bone and can be fatal; it’s use is prohibited in civilian areas;
• flechettes that are 4cm long darts used as anti-personnel weapons; they penetrate to the bone and can cause multiple horrific injuries; up to 8000 of them can be packed into one artillery shell; on explosion, they travel at high speed in multiple directions up to around 300 meters; and
• various other internationally prohibited weapons that PCHR investigations uncovered and condemned.

Its case studies show a consistent failure of Israeli forces to protect civilian lives, especially those of children. They document indiscriminate attacks against densely populated neighborhoods in grave violation of international laws.

To safeguard civilians and non-military areas and structures, IHL requires that precautions be taken in any attack, and civilian protection is paramount. Israel pays no heed and attacks indiscriminately in grave violation of the law.

Case Study One: The Olaiwa Family

Gaza City’s Isma’il (age 7), Mo’men (age 13), Mo’tassem (age 14) and Lana Olaiwa, (age 9) and their mother Amal were killed when an artillery shell struck their home on January 5, 2009. Three other family members were injured, including Amal’s husband, Haider, and her eldest son, Muntasser.

Two survivors were too badly injured to be interviewed. PCHR spoke to Fadwa Olaiwa, Haider’s sister, who lived two floors below. She said that 42 extended family members lived in the four-story house. The shell killed five of them in their kitchen where Amal was cooking.

When Fadwa heard the explosion, she ran upstairs and saw what happened. She found Amal decapitated by the refrigerator and the other bodies close by. Haider, Muntasser and Ghadir were taken to Gaza City’s al-Shifa Hospital. Haider sustained permanent facial and jaw injuries. Ghadir’s right arm was seriously injured. She and her father’s hearing were badly damaged. Muntasser had serious liver and stomach shrapnel wounds requiring two operations. Metal is still embedded in his right leg, and he continues to undergo treatment.

PCHR investigations confirm that no combatants or military targets were close by at the time of the attack. Artillery shells were fired indiscriminately, have a range of up to 60 km, and were used against entire areas, including civilian ones. This attack and many others like it constitute war crimes on two counts under Articles 8(2)(b)(ii) and (iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

Case Study Two: the al-Dayah Family

In the Zaytoun district of eastern Gaza, 22 family members were killed when a bomb struck their home — including 12 children and a pregnant woman. The explosion destroyed the house and buried many of the family inside. Only two family members survived, 28-year old Aamer and his brother Rida. Those killed included:

• Fayez Musbah Hasham, age 60
• Kawkab Sa’id Hussein, age 57
• Radwan Fayez Musbah, age 22
• Sabrin Fayez Musbah, age 24
• Raghda Fayez Musbah, age 34
• Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 36
• Rawda Hilal Hussein, age 32
• Ali Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 10
• Khitam Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 9
• Alaa’ Eyad Fayez Musbah, age 7
• Raba’a Eyad Fayez, age 6
• Sharaf Al-Din Eyad Fayez, age 5
• Mohammed Eyad Fayez, age 7 months
• Ramez Fayez Musbah, age 27
• Safaa’ Saleh Mohammed, age 20
• Baraa’ Ramez Fayez, age 1.5
• Salsabil Ramez Fayez, age 5 months
• Tazal Isma’il Isma’il Mohammed, age 28 and 8 months pregnant
• Amani Mohammed Fayez, age 6
• Qamar Mohammed Fayez, age 5
• Arij Mohammed Fayez, age 3, and
• Yousef Mohammed Fayez, age two

On February 3, 2009, PCHR interviewed Aamer al-Dayah (who was home) and his brother, Rida who was outside the house when attacked. Aamer said 24 family members shared seven apartments in the building. When it was struck, the force knocked Aamer unconscious, and he awakened under rubble. Rida was at a nearby mosque at the time. He rushed home, freed Aamer and his twin brother Radwan inside, still alive but only barely until he died on January 9.

Both survivors told PCHR that the explosion flung some family members meters outside their home while others inside were burned beyond recognition. They had no advance warning of an immanent attack, but PCHR fieldworkers learned there was military activity nearby. However, all al-Dayah family members were civilians. The IDF attack gravely breached international law and constitutes two war crime counts under Articles 8(2)(b)(ii) and (iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

According to IHL principles, Israeli forces used excessive and disproportionate force against a known civilian target resulting in the death of 22 al-Dayah family members — a crime Palestinians will long remember.

Case Study Three: the al-Battran family

On January 16, six al-Battran family members were slaughtered in their al-Bureji refugee camp home by an Israeli aircraft fired missile. Killed were Manal and five of her children:

• Manal, age 32
• Islam, age 15
• Eman, age 9
• twin sister Ehsan, age 9
• Bilal, age 6 and
• Izziddin, age 3

One year old son Abdul Hadi and Amal’s husband Issa survived. On February 25, PCHR interviewed Issa’s brother, Diaa’ who was in the house next door at the time of the attack. When he heard the explosion, he ran over and discovered the bodies, burnt and shorn of some body parts.

According to al-Battran family members, Issa hadn’t seen his wife and children since Operation Cast Lead began for fear of being assassinated. The day of the attack was the first time in January he was with them, only to pack clothing before heading to a safer location. He survived three earlier attempts to kill him because of his position in the Izz ad-Din Al Qassam Brigades.

Shrapnel at the scene identified a US-made Hellfire missile providing clear evidence of US involvement. Killing noncombatants is a war crime as defined in Article 8(2)(b)(iv) of the International Criminal Court Statute.

Other Case Studies: Further Examples of War Crime Attacks on Noncombatants, Including Children

(1) On January 16, two projectiles killed four Abu Eita family members outside their home, the youngest 2.5 year old Malak Abu.

(2) On January 9, two projectiles destroyed their house and killed six Salha family members, the youngest Bahaa, age 5

(3) On January 5, a projectile killed Mohammed Hijji. Earlier their home was commandeered by Israeli forces. Family members were held prisoners inside, then forced to be human shields so they could occupy a nearby house. Afterwards the family was ordered to evacuate Zaytoun where they lived, then shot at while leaving, killing their 2.5 year old daughter Shahd. Relatives and Arafat family members told to leave were also fleeing. In progress, one woman was shot and killed. Nine others were wounded. All are civilians, including children.

(4) on January 14, a projectile killed 14 year old Izziddin al-Farra in Qarara village in eastern Gaza while he and his friend Abdul Ghani were bicycling on a rural road. Abdul sustained a serious head injury.

(5) On January 4, Israeli forces shot and killed 1.5 year old Farah al-Helu. Family members were in their home. Soldiers entered, shot and killed 62 year old Fouad, then ordered the family to evacuate. Outside they were shot at, injuring three family members and killing Farah who bled to death. One family member described their ordeal. They tried crawling to safety. Most did but three others were struck and lay in the street. Farah bled to death because emergency care was denied — further evidence of a war crime atrocity.

(6) On December 29, a bombing of an adjacent mosque destroyed the Balousha family Jabaliya refugee camp home. Five of eight daughters were killed, the youngest Jawaher age four. Five others were injured and another five homes were seriously damaged.

(7) On January 6, two projectiles struck the yard of Mo’in Deeb’s Jabaliya refugee camp home when 10 family members were there. Ten were killed instantly, the youngest Nour Mo’in age 3. Others were injured, four critically. One subsequently died. Another had both legs amputated.

(8) On December 29, a bomb struck the al-’Absi family Yibna refugee camp home in Rafah while those in it were sleeping. Three children died instantly, the youngest Sidqi age 4. Their mother sustained critical injuries. Four other children were also injured.

(9) On January 17, a white phosphorous artillery shell struck the area around a Beit Lahiya school killing Bilal al-Ashqar (age 6) and Mohammed al-Ashqar (age 4). Two other family members were seriously injured. Their mother sustained critical head injuries and loss of her right hand. Her 19 year old daughter had her leg blown off. All were sheltering there at the time.

(10) On January 5, a projectile struck a house where the Abdul-Dayem family was attending a condolence ceremony. Those inside fled across the street and were struck by two tank shells containing flechettes. Three family members, including one child, were killed instantly. Two others, including a child, subsequently died of their injuries.

PCHR summarized the 23-day toll as follows:

“Alongside the 313 children killed by Israeli forces during (Operation Cast Lead), 1606 children were injured, with some sustaining horrific disabilities, head and spinal injuries, facial disfiguration, burns and amputation.”

Most were in their homes at the time. Others in shelters for their safety. Some of the injured couldn’t access medical care resulting in their permanent disability, infection, and for some their death. Even at hospitals, doctors were overwhelmed, under-resourced, and forced to deliver care under battlefield conditions.

The toll on parents and children was horrific, and some surviving adults face a lifelong task of caring for their permanently disabled offspring. Those who lost parents require help from relatives. The stench of death, injury, vast destruction, displacement, and Gaza still under siege pervades the Territory. The conflict’s psychological impact inflicted collective trauma — unrelieved and hardly noticed by Israel, America, the West, and most Arab states.

Children more than others suffer most and now experience “anger, sleeping difficulties, nightmares, avoidance of situations that are reminders of the trauma, impairment of concentration, and guilt” because they survived while others didn’t. Post Traumatic Stress Disorders (PTSD) approach epidemic levels, but fortunately Gaza’s Community Mental Health Programme (GCMHP) provides some of the best care of its kind in the Middle East. Years of conflict honed their skills.

After hostilities ended, they assessed the psychological damage on children and learned that the overwhelming majority personally witnessed traumatic events that could seriously impair their mental health. For example:

• 98% of children said they didn’t feel safe;
• 96% didn’t think they could protect themselves;
• 97% thought their families couldn’t protect them;
• 90% heard bombing;
• 89% saw homes destroyed from it;
• 65% were forced to evacuate their homes;
• 61% saw their neighbors’ homes bombed;
• 54% were either physically detained in their homes by soldiers or were trapped inside them during bombings and/or shellings; and
• 55% said they were told that one or more of their family members or relatives were killed.

Psychologist Hassan Ziyada said: “These children reported high levels of trauma and insecurity that will impact on the psychological and intellectual development….(They’re) suffering continual long-term trauma due to the psychological, social and economic effects of the recent offensive, the siege and closure of Gaza, and the internal political situation. This (attack) came at a very difficult time for all the people of Gaza, especially children, who were already suffering acute feelings of anxiety and powerlessness….Children in Gaza are continuing to exhibit long-term symptoms of hyperactivity, deterioration of their cognitive abilities, instrusive memories and hyper arousal and anxiety.”

Ziyada believes many children will develop long-term depression from the loss of loved ones and friends that contribute to a feeling of abandonment. He also said they’re experiencing physical body pain, headaches, stomach aches, insomnia and aggressive behavior.

In an appendix, PCHR listed all 313 children killed by name, gender, age, location, date of attack, and date of death. The youngest was one month old Al-Mu’tasim Bellah Mohammed Ibrahim al-Samouni. Also one month old Hala ‘Isam Ahmed al-Mnei’i. Israel expressed no regrets, neither did America.

Maslow’s Hierarchy of Needs may have begun as a classification of the internal motives of human action and the order in which they dominate our experience of life, but they have become a ‘selling’ list for the entrepreneur. A most basic biological tenet is that an organism is to be in primary control of the behaviors, environments and situations that meet its essential needs; that is to say, it is to be well adapted to its environment. A basic tenet of the entrepreneur is that no human need should be able to be met by the simple and direct action of the person; a way is to be found to intrude into the space between need and the behaviors or the material for the need’s satisfaction and to extract some amount of the energy in the transaction. And that is to say, a defining quality (as I have drawn it here) of the entrepreneur is very similar to the biological definition of parasitism.

In today’s human environment people do not directly meet their own needs, they purchase the terms of need satisfaction with abstract tokens that are intended as representations of energy or work. Such tokens only have power when a large enough number in a population honor that representation. And here is the tricky part: once people, structurally, have no means to meet their own needs by their direct action, then they must have a design or device that will move others to meet those needs. The consequence of this ‘reality’ is that ad hoc systems of exchange have transmogrified into economic structures. This is understandable, but what is not clear is why humans would see such tertiary, quaternary, etc. designs as primary… with magical properties.

Actually, it is not so mysterious; once we came to depend on these Rube Goldberg systems for the movement, storage and protection of abstract tokens of exchange, imbuing them with magical powers was a very human thing to do. This leads, ultimately, to a conflict of global proportion. The primary biological directive: ‘stay in direct control of need meeting behaviors and situations’ is challenged by the economic realities of an overpopulated and abstracted world where no need can be met without tokens of exchange; need-meeting opportunities all now have tollbooths.

We are at a place where the loss of faith in this Madness can destroy millions of lives, human and non-human. If we stop and wonder at the efficacy of existing money systems, if we even ask that they be examined or re-examined against biophysical models of reality, there is a great cry of foul, the threat of “economic failure” and even physical force. Also, those most vulnerable to perturbations in the system are actually harmed by the very suggestion of concern.

This is not to say that we are discouraged from giving attention to economics; it is understood that the designs of exchange can be a compelling study. How the tokens of exchange are given stable trade-able value, how items and behaviors are given value based on the stabilized token values or where and how these tokens move or are be stored and by whom, these are all questions that generate real, complex and fascinating options. But when such processes are seen as essentially immutable and more important than life itself, then a high level of insanity, strutting as authority, is doomed for a fall.

In our present situation this thinking leads to powerful contradictions: people are consuming less, which is a good thing for the biophysical reality. If this were to become habit and expectation, we just might be able to begin letting the planet heal itself, slow the loss of biodiversity, restructure human-environment relationships and just maybe begin to discover how to act in recognition of our outsized powers as change agents. Everyone would discover how to do with less, much less, that we do with now.

But… people are consuming less, so ways must be found to get people to consume more because the designs of the economic system require that consumption increase over time. If consumption slows, then the movement of the tokens of exchange slow and the designs that stabilize the value of the tokens and that assign token values for items and behaviors are perturbed. Trust is lost in the tokens and the whole structure becomes endangered. Since the only way to deliver essential needs is by the efficient functioning of the economic system, millions will suffer from even the slightest doubt or concern about its efficacy.

Not to put too fine a point on it, this is nuts.

No one is of the opinion that humans can increase in number and use of earthly resources forever. It is clear, even to crazy people, that a bucket can be filled and then can hold no more. Sensible humans recognize that we have been for sometime now trying to overfill our place on the planet. This is bad news and most people do not like bad news, but then again most people prefer bad news to worse news.

Sensible people must continue to hammer away with the ‘bad news’ that material possession is a drug delivered by a pusher economy, and that devoting time to avoiding the ‘tollbooths’ is more species verifying than working for the tokens to pay at them (I don’t think it bad news at all, since a simple life has proven for me to be far more fulfilling and purpose filled than the “economic” life).

We will only be able to change the present total domination of almost every detail of our lives by an exchange token economy by being able to meet the most essential of our needs by our own efforts: that is the bad news. And it is also good news since there is nothing more rewarding than to be in real control of even a short life compared to being the disenfranchised observer of a life owned by an economic system.

Two new studies released by the World Health Organization (WHO) and Oxfam reveal the devastating toll on Iraq’s surviving population in the wake of the U.S. war and occupation.

The U.S. has besieged Iraq, a country of some 27 million people, for the last 20 years. The 1991 Gulf War killed hundreds of thousands. Sanctions imposed on Saddam Hussein’s regime led to the deaths of over 1 million people. The 2003 invasion and occupation caused another 1 million deaths, drove in excess of 4 million from their homes and caused a civil war that tore apart the society. In sum, the U.S. has killed or displaced nearly a quarter of Iraq’s population.

According to the WHO’s Iraqi Mental Health Study, a survey of 4,332 Iraqis over the age of 18, about 17 percent of Iraqis admitted to suffering from some kind of mental disorder, the most common being depression, phobias, post-traumatic stress disorder and anxiety.

The Associated Press described this horrific number as a “surprisingly low rate of mental disorders.” But as Dr. Saleh Al Hassnawi, who was involved in the study, stated, “In Iraq, there is considerable stigma attached to having a mental illness.” So while already high, the real numbers are no doubt greater.

Of course, given the horrors of the last 30 years of U.S. attacks on Iraq, Iraqis have developed nearly super-human coping mechanisms to survive. As Dr. Abdul al-Monaf al-Jadiry remarked, “Gradually, people seem to have become accustomed to enduring hard experiences.”

Of those who reported suffering mental illnesses, 70 percent considered committing suicide. If extrapolated to the entire population, over 3 million Iraqis have considered suicide as a result of their disorders.

Given the combination of social stigma and the destruction of the Iraqi health care system, only 2 percent of those suffering mental problems sought out treatment. Most hid their conditions, self-medicated with various drugs, or asked for Valium and sleeping pills from pharmacists.

The study released from Oxfam is even more devastating. A survey of 1,700 women from five of Iraq’s 18 provinces, it portrays the impact of the occupation on women since 2003. “Now that the overall security situation, although still very fragile, begins to stabilize,” Oxfam stated, “countless mothers, wives, widows and daughters of Iraq remain caught in the grip of a silent emergency.”

The scale of the crisis in Iraqi women’s lives is mind-boggling. Oxfam reported that 55 percent of the women they surveyed reported they had been the victims of violence since 2003. Researchers also found that 55 percent of women had been displaced or forced to abandon their homes.

Despite the media celebrations of growing security in Iraq, 40 percent of those surveyed stated that their security situation was worse in 2008 over 2007. Close to 60 percent of women said that security and safety remained their most pressing concern.

As result of displacement and violence, over a third of the respondents had now become the effective head of their households. There are an estimated 740,000 widows in Iraq, and the actual number could be far higher.

The U.S. attempt to dismantle the central government’s traditional role as the hub of the economy and principal provider of social services has devastated these women. Seventy-six percent of widows said they did not receive their husband’s pensions from the government. While 76 percent said that they relied government food rations, 45 percent reported receiving it intermittently. Thirty-three percent had received no humanitarian assistance since 2003, and a majority stated that their income was lower in 2008 than in 2007 and 2006.

Oxfam reported, “Beyond security, the overwhelming concern women voiced was extreme difficulty accessing basic services such as clean water, electricity and adequate shelter . . . Availability of essentials such as water, sanitation, and health care is far below national averages.”

A quarter of women stated that they did not have access to drinking water on a daily basis and nearly half declared that the water they get is not even potable. Nearly two-thirds reported that they had less than six hours of electricity each day.

Access to education for women and their children is, unsurprisingly, no better. Oxfam reported that, “a staggering 40 percent of mothers surveyed said that their children not attending school. This is not only because of economic hardship, discrimination against girls and insecurity; it is also a result of the destruction and deterioration of education facilities.”

While the media trumpets this horror as success, those who opposed the war and occupation must not fall under their siren song. The U.S. government has committed one of the great crimes against humanity in Iraq and owes its people an enormous debt. The antiwar movement must continue to demand the complete and immediate withdrawal of all occupying troops and we must compel the U.S. government to pay reparations to the people of Iraq so that they can rebuild their society.

Aside from its sheer barbarism, this chant reflects the widespread belief among Israeli Jews that Israel scored an impressive victory in Gaza — a victory measured, not least, by the death toll.

Israeli pilots and tank commanders could not really discriminate between the adults and the children who hid in their homes or huddled in the UNRWA shelters, and yet they chose to press the trigger. Therefore, it is not at all surprising that the lethal onslaught left 1,314 Palestinians dead, of which 412 — or nearly one third of all of the casualties — were children.

This latest assault underscores that Israel, not unlike Hamas, readily resorts to violence and does not distinguish between civilians and combatants (only the weapons at Israel’s disposal are much more lethal). No matter how many times the Israeli government tries to blame Hamas for the latest Palestinian civilian deaths it simply cannot explain away the body count, especially that of the children. In addition to the dead, 1,855 Palestinian children were wounded, and tens of thousands of others have likely been traumatized, many of them for life.

Every child has a story. A Bedouin friend recently called to tell us about his relatives in Gaza. One cousin allowed her five-year-old daughter to walk to the adjacent house to see whether the neighbors had something left to eat. The girl had been crying from hunger. The moment she began crossing the street a missile exploded nearby and the flying shrapnel killed her. The mother has since been bedridden, weeping and screaming, “I have let my girl die hungry.”

As if the bloody incursion was not enough, the Israeli security forces seem to be keen on spreading the flames of hatred among the Arab population within Israel. Hundreds of Palestinian citizens of Israel have been arrested for protesting at the Israeli assault and more than 200 of them are still in custody. One incident is enough to illustrate the psychological effect these arrests will likely have on hundreds more children.

A few days after the ceasefire, several men wearing black ski masks stormed the home of Muhammad Abu Humus. They came to arrest him for protesting against the killings in Gaza. It was four in the morning and the whole family was asleep when the men banged on the door. After entering the house, they made Abu Humus’s wife Wafa and their four children Erfat (12), Shahd (9), Anas (6) and Majd (3) stand in a corner as they searched the house, throwing all the clothes, sheets, toys, and kitchenware on the floor. With tears in their eyes, the children watched as the armed men then took their father away and left.

Chance would have it that Abu Humus, a long-time peace activist and member of the Fatah party, is a personal friend of ours. In 2001, he joined Ta’ayush Arab-Jewish Partnership, and since then has selflessly organized countless peace rallies and other joint activities. During the past eight years, we have spent many hours at each other’s homes and our children have grown up respecting and liking one other. It is hard to believe that just one month ago he attended the Bar Mitzvah of Yigal’s son in a Jerusalem synagogue.

Muhammad and Wafa Abu Humus have tried over the years to instill in their children a love and desire for peace, and while the security forces may not have destroyed this, the hatred they have generated in one night cannot be underestimated. Indeed, what, one might ask, will his children think of their Jewish neighbors? What feelings will they harbor? And what can we expect from those children in Gaza who have witnessed the killing of their parents, siblings, friends and neighbors?

We emphasize the Palestinian children because so many of them have been killed and terrorized in the past month. Yet it is clear that Israeli children are suffering as well, particularly those who have spent long periods in shelters for fear of being hit by rockets.

The one message that is being conveyed to children on both sides of this fray is that the other side is a bloodthirsty monster. In Israel, this was instantly translated into gains for the hate-mongering Yisrael Beytenu party headed by the xenophobic Avigdor Lieberman, who is now the front-runner in mock polls being held in many Jewish high schools, with the hawkish Binyamin Netanyahu coming in second.

Hatred, in other words, is the great winner of this war. It has helped mobilize racist mobs, and as the soccer chant indicates it has left absolutely no place for the other, undermining even basic empathy for innocent children. Israel’s masters of war must be happy: the seeds of the next wars have certainly been sown.

Last month, trying to change the emerging historical consensus about a failed presidency, the White House published two lengthy reports, “Highlights of Accomplishments and Results of the Administration of George W. Bush,” and “100 Things Americans May Not Know About the Bush Administration Record.”

One of the surprising claims that stood out among the combined 90 pages of so-called accomplishments was the White House’s glowing assessment of Bush’s record on veterans’ issues. Bush claims he “provided unprecedented resources for veterans” over the past eight years and provided “the highest level of support for veterans in American history.”

“The President also increased the benefits available to those who have served our Nation and transformed the veterans health care system to better serve those who have sacrificed for our freedom,” both reports claim, adding that he “instituted reforms for the care of wounded warriors . . . and dramatically expanded resources for mental health services.”

The White House made these claims in the face of what former Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld might have called a “known known” — that the treatment of veterans returning from deployments in Iraq and Afghanistan has been a national disgrace, highlighted most dramatically by the neglect and substandard care given wounded troops at Walter Reed and other military hospitals.

The budget increases that have occurred mostly were enacted over Bush’s opposition or related to the fact that injuries from the Iraq War far exceeded the administration’s rosy projections in early 2003. The Bush team especially underestimated how many cases of post-traumatic stress disorder to anticipate as well as the number of brain injuries, which have been endemic to the Iraq War where insurgents made effective use of “improvised explosive devices,” or IEDs.

Before Bush ordered the invasion of Iraq in March 2003, documents released by the Department of Veterans Affairs said it expected a maximum of 8,000 cases of post-traumatic stress disorder.

However, according to a study released last year by the RAND Institute, there are more than 320,000 veterans of the Iraq and Afghan wars suffering from major depression, PTSD and/or traumatic brain injury. The report found that the VA has been and continues to be ill equipped to deal with these cases when soldiers return from combat, especially after multiple tours.

An Army task force last year also found major flaws in the way the VA treated and cared for veterans suffering from traumatic brain injuries.

Bush’s Record on VA Funding

For his part, Bush stacked the VA with political cronies, such as former Republican National Committee chairman Jim Nicholson, who as VA Secretary defended a budget measure that sought major cuts in staffing for health care and at the Board of Veterans Appeals; slashed funding for nursing home care; and blocked four legislative measures aimed at streamlining the backlog of veterans benefits claims.

Of the 84,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans diagnosed with post-traumatic stress disorder by VA, only half, about 42,000, had their disability claim approved by VA. Instead of expediting PTSD claims, Bush’s political appointees at VA actively fought against mental health claims.

Bush’s appointees also obstructed scientific research into the causes of Gulf War illnesses dating back 18 years to Operation Desert Storm and opposed medical research on treatment for 210,000 of those veterans.

As for funding, Bush proposed a 0.5 percent budget increase for the VA for fiscal year 2006, which amounted to a “cruel mockery” of Bush’s promises to do everything to support veterans and soldiers, Rep. Lane Evans, D-Illinois, said at the time.

Evans called Bush’s proposed budget increase for the VA “grossly inadequate,” saying it would force the VA to “ration” health care to veterans.

VA officials had testified in 2005 that the agency needed at least a 13 percent increase to meet the needs of hundreds of thousands of war veterans wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan and others who needed long-term mental health care.

In early 2007, the Washington Post put a spotlight on the human consequences resulting from the combination of Bush’s wars and the budget squeeze

The Post published a series of articles documenting the substandard conditions at the Walter Reed Army Medical Center, which is located only 4.7 miles from the White House. Wounded vets were housed in rooms with moldy walls, leaky plumage and an infestation of vermin, underscoring how out of touch Bush had become regarding the nation’s veterans.

In response to complaints that some veterans under VA care were being neglected, Nicholson said in March 2007 that such cases were “anecdotal exceptions.”

“When you are treating so many people there is always going to be a linen towel left somewhere,” he said.

In May 2007, the AP revealed that while Nicholson was pinching pennies on treatment costs and coping with a $1.3 billion budget shortfall, he awarded “$3.8 million in bonuses to top executives in fiscal 2006″ — many as much as $33,000.

Simultaneously, Bush was resisting congressional efforts to beef up the VA’s budget. In May 2007, Bush threatened to veto legislation that sought a 10 percent — $3.2 billion — increase, calling it too expensive. Bush proposed a 2 percent increase, far below what lawmakers and VA officials said was needed to treat a dramatic increase in traumatic brain injury and PTSD cases.

After Congress passed the legislation with the higher VA spending, Bush backed down on his veto threat but that was largely due to the fact that every Republican in the Senate with the exception of Jim DeMint of South Carolina, supported the measure.

Amid the growing scandals about substandard VA treatment and inept management, Nicholson resigned in July 2007.

Suicide Epidemic

Even after Nicholson’s resignation, the Department of Veterans Affairs continued to be buffeted by scandals, including a cover-up in an epidemic of veterans’ suicides and attempted suicides.

Last year, internal VA e-mails surfaced that showed how top agency officials tried to conceal the information from the public about the sudden increase in suicides and attempted suicides among veterans that were treated or sought help at VA hospitals around the country.

And last November, internal watchdogs discovered 500 benefits claims in shredding bins at the 41 of the 57 regional VA offices around the country.

Paul Sullivan, the executive director of Veterans for Common Sense, a veterans’ advocacy group that sued the VA in federal court, said attempts by the White House to portray Bush as an advocate for veterans is beyond shameful.

“Bush is the worst failure for our veterans since Hoover,” Sullivan said, expressing shock that the President “would shamefully continue his legacy of lies to the American people as he and his political cronies are forced to leave office on Jan. 20.”

Sullivan disputed some of Bush’s claims as misleading, such as the assertion that he doubled funding for the VA. “However, President Bush failed to disclose that the number of veterans seeking VA health care doubled, from 2.7 million to 5.5 million, and that rising health care inflation actually resulted in a net decrease in spending per veteran by VA during the past eight years,” he said.

“If not for the intervention of Congress to substantially increase VA funding beyond Bush’s inadequate budget requests, especially in the past two years, the situation would have deteriorated from a serious crisis to a catastrophe at VA.”

Sullivan, who worked at the VA for five years as a project manager, said Bush failed to the implement the VA’s proposed Mental Health Strategic Plan, a program aimed at identifying and quickly treating veterans suffering from major depression and were on the verge of suicide.

“Without implementation, funding, and oversight of the plan, several suicidal Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans were illegally refused emergency medical care by VA,” Sullivan said. “Veterans for Common Sense brought this issue to the attention of VA, and VA refused to act.

“Therefore, VCS sued VA for turning away suicidal veterans. After we filed our lawsuit, and only after we filed our lawsuit, the VA began a suicide prevention hotline. In the first 15 months of operation, the hotline received 85,000 calls and rescued more than 2,100 suicidal veterans.”

As of September 2008, 330,000 Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans have filed disability claims to the VA, according to the agency. Yet, 54,000 are still waiting for the VA to confirm their claims were received. The average wait for a disability claim is more than six months.

Additionally, according to VA’s Inspector General, 25 percent of the VA’s 55 million patients have to wait more than 30 days for a doctor’s appointment.

As costly as the treatment of Iraq and Afghan war veterans already has become, Bush is leaving an even greater budget hole for his successors.

In the book, The Three Trillion Dollar War, authors Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes wrote that future treatment of veterans would continue adding to the total cost of Bush’s conflicts and would put extraordinary stresses on the VA.

“Even in 2000, before the war,” they wrote, the VA was the subject of numerous Government Accountability Office studies that “identified long-standing problems, including large backlogs of pending claims, lengthy processing time for initial claims, high rates of error in processing claims, and inconsistency across regional offices.”

But the problems only have grown worse. “In a 2005 study,” Stiglitz and Blimes wrote, “the GAO found that the time to complete a veteran’s claim varied from 99 days at the Salt Lake City Office to 237 days in Honolulu. In a 2006 study, GAO found that 12 percent of claims were inaccurate.”

Homeless Veterans

The White House reports on Bush’s so-called accomplishments also claimed that Bush “reduced the number of homeless veterans by nearly 40 percent from 2001 to 2007. Established VA homeless-specific programs, which constitute one of the largest integrated networks of homeless treatment and assistance services in the country.”

That statement rankled Aaron Glantz, a journalist, author and the Rosalynn Carter Fellow for Mental Health Journalism at the Carter Center.

“What kind of President pats himself on the back with 200,000 veterans sleeping homeless on the street every night?” Glantz said in an interview. “What kind of administration puts out self-congratulatory press releases while over 6,000 veterans commit suicide every year?

“We can only hope that President elect Barack Obama takes a very different course once he’s in office. Otherwise, our government will repeat the shameful disgrace that was its treatment of wounded veterans returning home from Vietnam.”

Glantz spent three years in Iraq reporting on the war and recently published The War Comes Home: Washington’s Battle against America’s Veterans, which documents the heart-wrenching stories of homeless Iraq and Afghanistan war veterans and the plight of other veterans who, upon returning home, have been neglected by the country they served.

Last week, Glantz published a report, “Did You Know 200,000 Vets Are Sleeping on the Streets?,” that contradicts the Bush self-congratulations about veterans’ homelessness.

On his transition Web site, change.gov, Obama said he intends to “Fix the Benefits Bureaucracy: Hire additional claims workers, and improve training and accountability so that VA benefit decisions are rated fairly and consistently. Transform the paper benefit claims process to an electronic one to reduce errors and improve timeliness.”

To meet that challenge, Obama tapped retired Gen. Eric Shinseki, a Vietnam War veteran who sustained combat-related injuries, to lead the VA. Shinseki made headlines back in February 2003 when he testified before the Senate Armed Services Committee and predicted that several hundred thousand soldiers would likely be needed to maintain order in post-invasion Iraq.

After facing public criticism from Defense Secretary Rumsfeld and his deputy, Paul Wolfowitz, Shinseki was forced into early retirement. His judgment has since been vindicated, both in regard to likely ethnic strife in Iraq and on the costliness of the war.

Yet, Bush’s White House is now hoping that its last-minute propaganda barrage will, if nothing else, cloud some of the memories about its failures and misjudgments. Bush’s critics, however, are not willing to so easily forget.

“Contrary to his Administration’s latest spin, George W. Bush’s legacy on veterans is one of shameful neglect,” author Glantz said. “Rather than care for the tens of thousands of American service members wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan, the Bush Administration has thrown up a series of barriers to prevent veterans from getting the care they need.”

Simply put — White House propaganda aside — veterans’ health care has become worse, not better, under Bush’s leadership.

This was the case in the July 2006 war on Lebanon, during which the Israeli Health Ministry reported that 4,262 wounded Israeli civilians were treated in hospitals; this total was broken down into 33 seriously wounded patients, 68 moderately wounded, and 1,388 lightly wounded, with the remaining 2,773 treated for “shock and anxiety.” The UN Commission of Inquiry on Lebanon, meanwhile, cited the Lebanese authorities’ claim of 4,409 wounded Lebanese civilians—the only attempt at classification of casualties being a chart listing 56 different “collective massacres” conducted by Israeli forces during the war, with identifying labels such as: “Air raids struck heavily on the funeral procession of the victims of the previous day['s] air raids.”

BBC News reported different figures in its August 2006 civilian casualty scorecard for the war, according to which there were 32 seriously wounded Israelis, 44 moderately wounded Israelis, 614 lightly wounded Israelis, 1,985 Israelis treated for shock, and 3,697 wounded Lebanese. Israeli casualties were thus still overwhelmingly shock related, while the Lebanese were still:

   1. a lump sum.
   2. not affected by acute stress disorders.

The same trend will most likely hold for Gaza—and not only because it is difficult for hospitals to accommodate people with heightened norepinephrine levels when they cannot accommodate people with missing limbs.

I awoke this past Sunday morning to find that one Israeli in Sderot had been lightly wounded, four Israelis had been treated for shock, and 23 Palestinians had been killed in Gaza since midnight. After performing a Google search of the terms “Palestinians treated for shock”—which mainly produced articles about Israelis being treated for shock due to Palestinian behavior—I phoned a Palestinian friend in Lebanon in an attempt to determine why enemies of Israel did not enjoy the luxury of psychological conditions. The investigation was conducted in modified English, the idiomatic form on which Hassan and I relied for all of our communications:

   ME: Do Arabs ever go to hospital for problem with head?

   HASSAN: Arab he don’t have head.

This hypothesis would undoubtedly have been endorsed by ex-Israeli premier Golda Meir, who might have used it to back up her argument that Palestinians were not real people. Other possible excuses for the traditional embargo on Palestinian shock included the following:

   1. The Palestinians were used to having bombs fall on their heads.
   2. It was the Palestinians’ own fault that bombs were falling on their heads.
   3. Shock had become the exclusive property of Israel’s international sympathy campaign, as had the words “hail,” “shower,” and “barrage.”

The Health section of Sunday’s online edition of the Jerusalem Post offered some insight into the unique phenomenon of Israeli shock. The main article was entitled “Escaping the trauma vortex,” which—although it sounded more like instructions for breaking down the Rafah border crossing—turned out to be the goal of Somatic Experiencing (SE), a self-healing philosophy that had recently been advertised in Sderot.

The article begins on a Friday morning at the “bomb-proofed Sderot Resiliency Center,” where visiting SE guru Gina Ross of Los Angeles is presiding in front of a rapt audience of health care professionals and social workers. According to the author of the article, the meeting has been auspiciously timed given the fragility currently felt by Israelis in the vicinity of the Gaza Strip, most of whom are nonetheless described as “sleeping in on the first day of the weekend.” A corresponding estimate of how many Gazans sleep in on Friday mornings is not provided.

The “upbeat” Ms. Ross describes the purpose of SE as replacing the “trauma vortex” with a “healing vortex.” The trauma vortex is the result of “an uncompleted biological response to threat, which leaves the system in an excessively high level of arousal, with thwarted movements of defense frozen in time”; the healing vortex occurs when victims learn how to “thaw the freeze and release the sensory motor expressions of trauma-based emotions.” Ross enthusiastically contends that the replacement process is sometimes possible in only a few sessions, even with years of buildup.

The SE method was developed by Dr. Peter Levine, who is described in the article as being the author of the book Taming the Tiger; it turns out that the book is in fact called Waking the Tiger, which is perhaps more appropriate in the Israeli context given apparent preferences for unleashing beasts rather than deterring them. In addition to a host of other titles, Ross is the Middle East senior trainer for Levine’s Foundation for Human Enrichment, as well as a self-proclaimed expert in overcoming “the insecurity and difficulties of exile”—her family having fled their home in Syria and later their home in Lebanon. Familiarity with exile might prove useful in the event that Gaza is one day deemed to be deserving of human enrichment, or somatic experience in general.

Ms. Ross has determined that Israelis, Palestinians, and Israeli-Arabs all suffer from collective trauma vortices—especially the second group, whose vortex “has been spiraling out of control for a while.” Thus, although the Gazans are permitted in this case to suffer psychologically, they are doomed to fail even at their own suffering, as it is not possible to implement a collective healing vortex while an army financed by the global superpower is overhead and underfoot.

The SE method does, however, provide innovative opportunities for such international notables as:

   1. Barack Obama, who is in danger of developing a trauma vortex due to repeated reliance on the “flight” option in fight or flight situations—namely AIPAC addresses and opinions on the war on Gaza.
   2. MK Shai Hermesh, resident of a kibbutz close to the Gazan border, who—Tzipi Livni explained to a meeting of foreign diplomats in Sderot on 28 December—”has had to almost live in a shelter for weeks now.” Livni declared the situation “unbearable,” although this description most likely did not apply to the situation of Palestinian MPs held indefinitely in Israeli administrative detention.

Gina Ross’ assertion that “peace can only come from balanced collective nervous systems” might also prove revelatory for other members of the international community, such as those under the impression that peace can only come from preventing Israel’s disassembly of Palestine into non-contiguous enclaves. Instead of fretting over what percentage of remaining Palestinian territories should be permitted on the Israeli side of soaring cement walls, Middle East envoy Tony Blair might thus focus on more concrete issues like building emotional resilience into the roadmap for peace. Blair has already demonstrated a strong commitment to resilience, by choking back tears while discussing letters received from parents whose sons have died in Iraq but who nonetheless retain their conviction in the rightness of war.

(In keeping with the global distribution of power, Iraqis—like Gazans—have been judged unworthy of psychological victimhood, which is reserved for coalition troops, their families, and people who duct tape their windows to guard against WMD attack. Incidentally, the fourth item in the list of results returned by a Google search of the terms “Iraqis treated for shock” was a Haaretz article from 2007, entitled “Qassam fired from Gaza hits Sderot; man treated for shock.”)

Near the end of the Jerusalem Post article on escaping the trauma vortex, an Israeli SE practitioner at the Sderot meeting declares her intention to host an emotional first-aid workshop for citizens of Jerusalem experiencing secondary—i.e. vicarious—trauma. Not discussed at the meeting was whether emotional first-aid should also be administered to American citizens experiencing secondary trauma, such as Alan Dershowitz.

Moving on to the second headline in the Health section of JPost.com, I was informed that: “Emotional hot lines see sharp rise in callers from the South,” most of whom were experiencing repercussions of the imbalance of the Gazan collective nervous system. According to the spokeswoman for the hotline run by Natal—Israel’s Trauma Center for Victims of Terror and War—a number of parents were concerned that their children were not eating or drinking; such behavior would have been less of a concern in Gaza, given the lack of food and drink.

Natal’s advice to those battling the trauma vortex included:

   1. moderately abstaining from news reports.
   2. finding “light entertainment to ease them through the stress.” (The word “entertainment” was underlined; when I clicked on it I was transported to a website in Spanish where I was invited to download popular tunes to my cellular phone.)
   3. encouraging small children to spend time in their bomb shelters even when there were not air raid sirens, such that the shelters would become associated with things other than fear of death.

A visit to the Natal website itself revealed that many of the hotline callers were from northern Israel and were “experiencing flashbacks from the Second Lebanon War.” Condoleezza Rice, meanwhile, was also experiencing flashbacks to this particular war, and repeated that a ceasefire should never allow a return to the status quo ante, i.e., Gaza.

The Natal website describes the residents of southern Israel as “living in an abnormal reality” and provides them with coping tools, including a list of exercises entitled “Muscle Relaxation For Children.” In one of the exercises listed, parents are advised to have their children pretend that: “A little elephant is coming closer; in a moment it’s going to step on your stomach! Tighten your stomach; make your muscles as tight as you can. The elephant is gone; now your stomach can relax again.”

Alternate therapeutic activities are explored on SderotMedia.com, which features a video of a small boy in a black yarmulke intently decorating a Qassam rocket he has fashioned out of a plastic bottle, paper, and masking tape. A more complex juxtaposition of innocence and war can of course be found in the photos of Israeli children decorating missiles en route to Lebanon in 2006, but the director of the SderotMedia video does cover additional symbolic ground in the final scene, in which the decorated Qassam is placed in the middle of the floor with a baby in a purple sweater seated a short distance away. The baby eyes the Qassam for a few seconds, then crawls over to it and knocks the rocket over.

Further navigation of the website produced an article to accompany the video, entitled “Environmental Friendly Kassams.” In the article, the mother of the Qassam decorator explains that “the encounter with threat through creation” provides a sense of security to the children of Sderot (or at least to the 70-94% of them that SderotMedia diagnoses with Post Traumatic Stress Disorder). The author of the piece supplies more relevant background information, such as that the “Color Red” alert is as familiar a concept to these children as the word “Dad,” and that the kids “don’t really care if the IDF is the one who began with the response”—an example that the rest of the world might follow. The SderotMedia article raised several questions in my mind, namely:

   1. whether my own brother’s childhood paintings of Apache helicopters had constituted a healing vortex.
   2. whether his artistic inclinations had also been the fault of Hamas.
   3. whether the youth of Sderot might be prevailed upon to develop environmentally friendly versions of other regional staples, such as depleted uranium.

After viewing another video of Sderot—this one starring a woman in a nightgown trembling in her house—I returned one last time to the Health section of the Jerusalem Post’s website to find an article entitled “Psychologically Speaking: Feeling sad.” This piece explored other potential reasons aside from rocket hail that Israelis might feel down, such as seasonal affective disorder (SAD), brought on by winter, and reverse seasonal affective disorder, brought on by summer.

Most Palestinians in Gaza at the moment presumably do not have enough spare time to be affected by seasonal changes, nor are the melatonin supplements recommended to combat SAD likely to be available on humanitarian aid trucks. Regular explosions, however, might offer Gazans access to some of the other suggested treatments, such as bright light therapy. The Israeli government, meanwhile, might consider ceasing the exploitation of its citizens’ genuine psychological torment in order to justify existential battles against its neighbors.

Late last year he gave a talk to the prestigious Royal Society in London where he said, “Few seem to realise that the [Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change] IPCC models predict almost unanimously that by 2040 the average summer in Europe will be as hot as the summer of 2003 when over 30,000 died from heat. By then we may cool ourselves with air conditioning, but without extensive irrigation the plants will die and both farming and natural ecosystems will be replaced by scrub and desert. What will there be to eat? The same dire changes will affect the rest of the world and I can envisage Americans migrating into Canada and the Chinese into Siberia, but there may be little food for any of them.”

And recently it was reported that the average summer temperature in Sydney, Australia could be close to 50 degrees C. Average?? So we all ’solve’ that by getting air conditioning. But what runs that but electricity, and in this country that means coal. Being the creatures we are, we arrange to keep cool by using just what is required to make us even hotter.

The fact that we can even consider this idiotic idea to save us in the future, without dealing with our lifestyle now so it does not happen, is the reason for this article.

On the way I am going to explore two other tracks. This is the second: In the past fifty years the rich countries have used more resources than every human who ever lived before. We are the throw-away culture – and that is only because we are producing so much we can afford to throw things away.

I lived in Bali for a while in the 70s. There was no plastic, little metal, and just enough food. Nothing was ever thrown away as everything, no mater how small, could be put to good use. Wrapping was a banana leaf, and when finished was eaten by the pigs.

By comparison our waste (the waste that reflects how much we make and consume) is beyond belief. Though I have only US figures, ours are comparable. One example will do: every year Americans throw away enough aluminum cans to make six thousand DC-10 airplanes.

It makes an interesting quiz question: the total US yearly waste would fill a convoy of ten-ton garbage trucks long enough to:

a. reach half-way to the moon
b. wrap around the Earth six times
c. connect the North and South Poles
d. build a bridge between North America and China

The answer is b. Even though Americans comprise only five percent of the world’s population, they use nearly a third of its resources and produce almost half of its hazardous waste. And in Australia we could not find the gumption to phase out plastic bags.

So, here is the third track: In a recent survey of people who voluntarily cut back their consumption, eighty-six percent said that they were happier as a result. Only nine percent said they were less happy.

Three tracks. They tell us that high consumption is threatening the planet, burying us under unbelievable amounts of waste, and is not making us happier. Something is definitely wrong.

Why are we doing this?

We are in fact quite clever in deceiving ourselves. We have exported the more obvious toxic wastes of the industries that satisfy our consumption to other countries, to China and India where carbon emissions rose by 8 percent last year, and will rise even more this year.

The CSIRO, Australia’s federal research centre, reported the global outcome: “There has been a four-fold increase in the rate of human-generated carbon dioxide emissions since 2000.” Four-fold (!!) and the world is supposed to becoming conscious of global warming, serious about mitigating it and holding endless and apparently futile conferences in Kyoto, Nairobi and Bali to address it.

In spite of all the rhetoric, the situation is getting worse by the day.

This four-fold increase has come because we are consuming more and more. Now why is this? Knowing the state of the planet surely we would rein ourselves in – but do we? There has been enough information shoved in front of us, but what are we doing with that?

Little, and for good reason.

Remember I am a therapist and have worked with clients for twenty years. In my experience most of us take whatever frightens us or makes us uncomfortable and push it out of sight. This puts it into the unconscious. It does not disappear, but just lies in waiting like a faithful hound until let out.

Meanwhile the conscious part can go on living as if nothing had happened. But as Carl Jung pointed out so perspicaciously, the hound keeps howling from the depth and thereby influences all that we do. So we cant go on as before. We may try to carry on as always, but in truth everything we do is influenced by the unseen and suppressed feelings from the hound in the kennel.

There being no escape, we act out this unconscious material, but pretend we are still being normal. This seems to be the reason we have all become so much busier during the past ten years, and why we are buying more and more as if there is no tomorrow. The greedy men on Wall Street invented ways of making money that could not be sustained, especially over the past 6 or 7 years. The hierarchy in China started building coal-fired power stations at the rate of six or seven every month, and India is planning not to be left behind.

Wherever we look there is madness. Fishermen, knowing that 90 percent of the big fish have gone, resort to bottom trawling that eradicates all in its path; loggers destroy the ‘lungs of the planet’ in an unscrupulous grab for profits; the Balinese build over their paddy fields to make room for tourist hotels; etc etc. The whole world is in a mad grab for the last bit before it is all gets burnt up.

This is the influence of the hound in the unconscious. We don’t understand what is really motivating us, but remain caught in the excitement of having shiny new things, and to hell with the consequences.

Why? Isn’t it better to be honest? In fact, no – its more dangerous by a long shot.

In my experience, once we begin to open Pandora’s Box we cannot be sure what will come creeping out. Most of my clients quite quickly recognise that they don’t really love themselves. When they look inside it feels empty. I have only rarely met a client who does not feel there is an vacant hole within that is black and full of grief.

It is an essential aspect of growing up that we suppress who we really are in order to be accepted and loved by mum and dad. This means we actually push our real needs away in order to cope with their demands. It is as if we have sacrificed our original selves to get their love, and it leaves a trail of sorrow.

We call it Existential Grief because its about our very existence. It is about us being ’socialised’ by the family and school so that we forget who we truly are. This leaves an enormous grief that is too difficult to confront, and we hide it in the kennel of the unconscious, leaving the howls from the kennel to undermine our self-confidence.

In our society we use material goods and social roles to cover up the black hole of grief. By surrounding ourselves with pretty and expensive things we tell everyone else that we are really OK. This is, so I learn from my clients, the major cause of going shopping, going on buying sprees and being consumers. We have come to believe that bright new things will fill the empty spaces inside.

This seems to be why we cannot really confront the devil of global warming that is being fed by every dollar we spend. For our own safety as a species we should all be consuming less and sharing more and striving to make life simple, whereas we are literally hell-bent on getting the most while we still can.

The hound sitting in the kennel of our emptiness makes it too hard for us to look at the truth and change our ways. We cannot alter the terminal path we are on, because to do so would expose our deepest fears that underneath all the tinsel and stuff we really are not worth much at all. Not even the protection we should be giving to our beautiful children is enough to move us to confront this terrifying personal fear.

A four-year analysis of the world’s ecosystems sponsored by the Worldwatch Institute found that over-consumption has pushed 15 out of 24 ecosystems essential to human life “beyond their sustainable limits.” Our insatiable desire for more is moving the planet toward a state of collapse that may be “abrupt and potentially irreversible.”

Since we all know that, can we not go beyond the fear to follow David Attenborough, who said in a recent interview, “How could I look my grandchildren in the eye and say I knew and did nothing?“

The details of the controversial program were discussed in multiple meetings inside the White House over a two-year period, triggering concerns among several officials who worried that the agency’s methods might be illegal or violate anti-torture treaties, according to separate statements signed by Rice and her top legal adviser. (”Top Officials Knew in 2002 of Harsh Interrogations,” Joby Warrick, The Washington Post, Thursday, September 25, 2008; A07)

John Bellinger III, Rice’s legal adviser at the State Department and during her tenure at the National Security Council (NSC), said in answer to written questions by Senate investigators, “I expressed concern that the proposed CIA interrogation techniques comply with applicable U.S. law, including our international obligations.”

As The New York Times reported,

The documents provide new details about the still-murky early months of the C.I.A.’s detention program, when the agency began using a set of harsh interrogation techniques weeks before the Justice Department issued a written legal opinion in August 2002 authorizing their use. Congressional investigators have long tried to determine exactly who authorized these techniques before the legal opinion was completed. (Mark Mazzetti, “Bush Aides Linked to Talks on Interrogations,” The New York Times, September 25, 2008)

In other words, as with the invasion and occupation of Iraq, indeed as with a host of other illegal White House programs across the entire “battlespace” of the “war on terror,” legal niceties were supplied by the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel (OLC) and then crafted, as with pre-war intelligence, “to fit the policy” (torture) already in place.

The Times reported that “Justice Department lawyers gave oral guidance to the C.I.A. before the secret memo was completed.” Fearful of prosecution, CIA lawyers ordered the use of “harsh techniques” employed by CIA officers “suspended” until their formal authorization by White House proxies in the Justice Department.

Mazzetti reported that former National Security Council legal adviser Bellinger wrote “that during the White House meetings, Justice Department lawyers frequently issued oral guidance to the C.I.A. about the interrogation program. One who did was John Yoo, the principal author of the August 2002 memo, Mr. Bellinger said.”

As ABC News revealed in April,

In dozens of top-secret talks and meetings in the White House, the most senior Bush administration officials discussed and approved specific details of how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, sources tell ABC News. (”Sources: Top Bush Advisors Approved ‘Enhanced Interrogation’,” Jan Crawford Greenburg, Howard L. Rosenburg and Ariane de Vogue, ABC News, April 9, 2008)

As chair of the National Security Council, Rice presided over the meetings but when the ABC News story first broke, the White House declined to comment on her participation. With good reason, as it turns out!

In 2002, the National Security Council’s Principals Committee included Vice President Cheney, Rice, Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld, Secretary of State Colin Powell as well as CIA Director George Tenet and U.S. Attorney General John Ashcroft.

According to ABC News “Rice chaired the meetings, which took place in the White House Situation Room and were typically attended by most of the principals or their deputies.” Discussions around specific techniques to be used by CIA interrogators were so detailed, ABC News reported, they “were almost choreographed” by high-level Bush administration officials.

The network also reported that at one meeting, Ashcroft famously complained: “Why are we talking about this in the White House? History will not judge this kindly.” Nor would federal prosecutors if America were a “normal” country.

Viewed as an exemplary means of expanding executive power, Cheney’s shop instructed the Office of Legal Counsel to write a series of still-classified memos that gave the CIA formal legal authority to use what the administration and corporate media euphemistically call “enhanced interrogation techniques” on alleged al-Qaeda suspects.

The Bybee-Yoo memos, with major input from Cheney’s legal adviser (now Chief of Staff), David Addington, are referred to as a “Golden Shield” for CIA repressors fearful of future prosecution as war criminals.

In her response to the question posed by Senate investigators, “Where did it [discussion of prisoner interrogation] take place (e.g., meeting at the Pentagon, etc)?” Rice confirmed ABC’s report, “All of the meetings I attended on these matters occurred inside the White House.”

When pressed by investigators: “Were you present at a meeting at which the OLC gave oral advice about the legality of interrogation techniques proposed for or in use by the CIA?” the Secretary of State replied, “I was present in meetings at which DoJ lawyers provided legal advice about the CIA program. I recall that John Yoo provided advice at several of these meetings. I do not recall if other members of OLC were also present. … I do not know whether any oral advice provided by OLC attorneys differed from OLC’s written advice.”

But as congressional investigators and media reports have previously revealed, the OLC’s “oral advice” most certainly did not differ from their “written advice” since it was supplied by torture-enabler Yoo who acted as a proxy for Cheney’s legal adviser, David Addington.

SASC investigators then turned their attention to the Pentagon’s Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) programs. ”On July 25, 2002 the Chief of Staff to the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) informed the DoD Office of the General Counsel [run by Addington protégé William J. Haynes II], that ‘JPRA will continue to offer exploitation assistance to those governmental organizations charged with the mission of gleaning intelligence from enemy detainees.’ Were you aware that JPRA was offering such assistance?” Rice replied, “I am unfamiliar with the JPRA and am unaware of whether it offered any assistance with interrogations.”

Investigators then questioned NSC legal adviser John Bellinger III. Right from the start, Bellinger played the “Alberto Gonzales card” in his written responses: “The Committee’s questions relate to events that occurred five and six years ago while I served as NSC Legal Adviser during an extraordinarily busy and taxing period. In many cases, I simply do not recall the specific details the Committee has requested.” (emphasis added)

To the questions: “Was there any discussion(s) of specific interrogation techniques used or proposed for use in detainee interrogations?” And: “Was there any discussion(s) about physical and/or psychological pressures used in SERE training?” Bellinger replied: “I was present at meetings in 2002 and 2003 with some or most of the listed individuals at which specific interrogation techniques used or proposed for use in detainee interrogations by the CIA was discussed.” And: “I was present in meetings at which SERE training was discussed. I recall being told that numerous U.S. military personnel had undergone SERE training without significant ill-effect.”

But the policy on the use of reverse-engineered SERE tactics had already decided upon months earlier by Rumsfeld’s Pentagon. Indeed, an April 16, 2002 email from Dr. Bruce Jessen, an outsourced psychologist employed by JPRA and the CIA, to Col. Randy Moulton, the Commander of the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) and copied to two other contractors, Christopher Wirts and Mike Dozier demonstrate JPRA’s enthusiasm for the project. Entitled: “Draft Exploitation Plan,” Jessen writes,

Sir,

My initial draft plan. If you decide to proceed with this I will have more details to add to this skeleton.

I am sending this to Mike and Chris so they can operationalize my draft into a CONOP [Concept of Operations] for your consideration.

Bruce

Jessen’s “concept” has been conveniently redacted from SASC documents but Moulton’s reply is significant in that JPRA’s Commander whole-heartedly endorsed reverse-engineering SERE techniques for prisoner torture.

Doc,

We need to craft a 10-12 slide briefing to take up for approval to include what generated this requirement, why we (USG) need it, how it falls within our Chartered responsibilities (or if not, why we should do it) and then make a recommendation.

Colonel Randy Moulton

Commander JPRA

Jessen, as we’ve subsequently learned, supplied what JPRA and their Pentagon masters were looking for in spades. Along with partner James Mitchell, another outsourced psychologist employed by JPRA and the CIA, the duo’s Spokane, Washington-based Mitchell, Jessen & Associates was located close to the Air Force’s SERE school program. The pair, along with military psychologists, did the heavy-lifting to tailor SERE for CIA and Pentagon torture programs. According to investigative journalist Jane Meyer,

Soon, the former SERE psychologists were training CIA interrogators and advising the CIA on implementing a program that one knowledgeable source describes as “a Clockwork Orange kind of approach.” As psychologists they were unusually well-equipped to understand the human psyche. (Jane Meyer, The Dark Side, New York: Doubleday, 2008, p. 163)

“Well-equipped” indeed. According to SASC Chairman Senator Carl Levin, in July 2002, Richard Shiffrin, a Pentagon Deputy General Counsel called Lieutenant Colonel Daniel Baumgartner, the Chief of Staff at the Joint Personnel Recovery Agency (JPRA) “and asked for information on SERE techniques.” Baumgartner responded by drafting a memo with three attachments. According to Levin’s June 17, 2008 statement and supporting documentation released by the SASC,

One of those attachments (TAB 3) listed physical and psychological pressures used in SERE resistance training including sensory deprivation, sleep disruption, stress positions, waterboarding, and slapping. It also made reference to a section of the JPRA instructor manual that talks about “coercive pressures” like keeping the lights on at all times, and treating a person like an animal. Another attachment (TAB 4), written by Dr. Ogrisseg, also a witness today, assessed the long-term psychological effects of SERE resistance training on students and the effects of the waterboard.

During SASC hearings last Thursday, Colonel Steven Kleinman, a senior officer at the Air Force Academy who supervised that service’s SERE program said in testimony he was “shocked” when he witnessed use of the harsh physical and psychological tactics used to train combat pilots facing potential capture during hostile encounters, employed haphazardly on Iraqis in a U.S. prison camp.

Kleinman told Senate investigators that SERE training “had morphed into a form of punishment for those who wouldn’t cooperate.” He testified that he told the task force commander “that the methods were unlawful and were in violation of the Geneva Conventions.”

But as we now know, SERE techniques were reverse-engineered on orders from the highest levels of the Defense Department and the Vice President’s office precisely as a mechanism to break recalcitrant “al-Qaeda” and Iraqi prisoners stripped by White House lawyers of all rights under the Geneva Conventions.

Disingenuously however, Kleinman claimed that SERE tactics were adopted from torture methods used by “Chinese communists.” While historically accurate up to a point, Kleinman failed to disclose their current provenance: the decades-long programs developed by both the CIA and U.S. Military Intelligence that refined crude Stalinist-era methods of psychological torture.

After the Korean war, the CIA embarked on a nightmarish program, MKULTRA. Indeed, as I wrote in April, the programs employed at Guantánamo Bay, CIA “black sites” in Europe and Afghanistan and at prisons across Iraq were a distillation of coercive techniques devised during the 1950s and 1960s by MKULTRA psychiatrists.

Indeed, as Scott Shane reported in The New York Times, a 1957 Air Force study titled “Communist Attempts to Elicit False Confessions From Air Force Prisoners of War,” written by Albert D. Biderman, a sociologist, served as one of the primary sources of the CIA’s torture manual, “KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation.”

CIA-Military Intelligence PSYWAR programs were further crystallized with the publication of the “Human Resource Exploitation Training Manual-1983” (HRE). The secret manual, compiled from sections of the KUBARK guidelines and from U.S. Military Intelligence field manuals were “written in the mid 1960s as part of the Army’s Foreign Intelligence Assistance Program code-named ‘Project X’,” The National Security Archive reports.

In other words, while “Chinese communists” may have gotten the psychological torture ball rolling, the United States Government’s intelligence apparatus picked it up and ran with it.

The “refined” methods described in KUBARK and HRE included: forced drugging, hooding, sexual humiliation, extended sensory deprivation, prolonged interrogation, environmental and dietary manipulation, beatings, stress positions and other methods of “self-inflicted pain.” CIA officers and their Military Intelligence doppelgängers, at the urging of White House masters, systematically committed war crimes on defenseless prisoners in their custody.

In a major breakthrough that demolished the mendacious claims of the Bush regime, documents released by the Senate Armed Service Committee in June, provided irrefutable evidence that top Pentagon and CIA officials sought out military and “outsourced” mercenary personnel, including psychologists like Jessen and Mitchell, precisely to reverse-engineer SERE tactics for use on prisoners designated “enemy combatants” by the administration.

Psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz, Salon investigative journalist Mark Benjamin and Jane Meyer’s reports in The New Yorker have all documented that moves by Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) tasked to the Guantánamo Bay detention facility, followed hot on the heels of explicit demands by the Bush torture team to “take the gloves off.” At Guantánamo and elsewhere, BSCT psychologists held operational positions and did not function as mental health providers but rather, were present at Guantánamo for the purpose of instructing personnel in the use of “enhanced interrogation” tactics, torture.

While hearings by the Senate Armed Services Committee has provided solid evidence of widespread human rights abuses by the Bush administration and their minions, the Democratic-controlled Congress has systematically failed to bring these war criminals to justice.

There is no mistaking the pattern: given ample opportunity to purge the American political landscape of these miscreants, Congress has abnegated its legal right and moral duty to remove Bushist malefactors from power.

With “impeachment off the table,” as House Speaker Nancy Pelosi infamously declared in 2006, from preemptive wars of conquest to warrantless wiretapping, and from the systematic looting of the economy to the heinous torture of prisoners of war, the Democratic Party is fully complicit with the Bush administration’s high crimes and misdemeanors.

The cover-up continues…

Since 2004, news reports and government documents have provided evidence of the central role of psychologists in designing, implementing, and disseminating the administrations’ program of abusive interrogations, whether conducted by the CIA in its secret “black sites” or by the Defense Department at Guantánamo, and in Iraq and Afghanistan. As Vanity Fair reporter Katherine Eban described the CIA side of this equation:

“I… discovered 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 C.I.A.”

On the Defense Department side, the Senate Armed Services Committee reported in June 2008 on the role of military psychologists in helping design the harsh interrogation techniques used at Guantánamo. As Senator Levin described in his opening remarks:

“a… senior CIA lawyer, Jonathan Fredman, who was chief counsel to the CIA’s CounterTerrorism Center, went to GTMO, attended a meeting of GTMO staff and discussed a memo proposing the use of aggressive interrogation techniques. That memo had been drafted by a psychologist and psychiatrist from GTMO who, a couple of weeks earlier, had attended the training given at Fort Bragg by instructors from the JPRA SERE school.

While the memo remains classified, minutes from the meeting where it was discussed are not. Those minutes (TAB 7) clearly show that the focus of the discussion was aggressive techniques for use against detainees.”

The minutes from that meeting show this psychologist and psychiatrist recommending creating an atmosphere of “controlled chaos,” which would “foster dependence and compliance,” through the creation of “psychological stress” by means of using such techniques as ” sleep deprivation, withholding food, isolation, loss of time.” This strategy was implemented and became standard operating procedure.

For example, in September 2003, young (16 or 17 year old) Mohammed Jawad became upset during interrogation, talking to pictures on the wall and crying for his mother. A military psychologist, a behavioral science consultant, was brought in for guidance. She recommended Jawad be placed in a month of “linguistic isolation” while the interrogator ratcheted up the pressure to break him down. This treatment apparently contributed to a suicide attempt by Jawad.

Evidence has accumulated of psychologists designing and contributing to detainee abuses sometimes amounting to torture. Despite the overwhelming evidence, the APA has steadfastly insisted that psychologists should not participate in torture; they argued, rather, that psychologists were vitally needed to help interrogators better obtain information while simultaneously, according to the APA, preventing detainee abuses. The APA used a multitude of techniques to defend their policy. They appointed a task force to formulate ethics policy around national security interrogations without informing the membership or the public that the majority of members were from the military-intelligence establishment. The APA passed anti-torture resolutions while rejecting attempts to withdraw psychologists from sites that violated human rights or even from the interrogations at Guantanamo and the CIA’s black sites.

The APA also ignored Open Letters from hundreds of their members. At times these efforts became ludicrous doublespeak. An APA Board member, for instance, sent around an email claiming that the very Senate Armed Services hearing that implicated military psychologists in the design of torture techniques actually exonerated the psychologists and the discipline. The association’s ethics director even claimed documents released by the ACLU showed the APA’s “policy of engagement” was working to protect detainees when the document in question apparently merely reported that one psychologist in Iraq once stopped an interrogation prior to the detainee dying or, perhaps, suffering serious physical damage. Through it all, the APA maintained its close ties to the military-intelligence establishment.

While the APA leadership resisted all challenges to its position, the members and other psychologists and their allies did not remain silent. Dissident members worked tirelessly to change the organizations’ position. Some worked within official association committees. During 2006-2007, members pushed a Moratorium resolution that would have temporarily halted participation in interrogations at the detention sites; the measure was undercut by APA organizational manipulations, and a derivative effort was decisively defeated by the associations’ Council of Representatives in August 2006. A number of prominent psychologists – including a former ethics committee Chair, a former Executive Director of one of the associations’ major divisions, and a former division President – resigned in protest. New York Times bestselling author Mary Pipher returned an award to the APA. Hundreds stopped paying membership dues, aided by a policy that allowed dues withholders to remain members for two years. Colleagues in other countries expressed their disapproval of APA policies. Physicians for Human Rights documented U.S. psychological torture and many times called for changes in APA policies permitting participation in the settings where that torture occurred.

After years of failing to effect real change through the associations’ Council of Representatives – which infrequently challenges the APA leadership on issues of vital importance to those leaders – dissident members and allies turned in 2008 to new strategies designed simultaneously to take advantage of, and to bypass, the official structures. Members of the withholdapadues group found a never before used provision in the association by-laws allowing for a member-initiated policy referendum. Three psychologists – Dan Aalbers, Brad Olson, and Ruth Fallenbaum – got to work writing a referendum rejecting the participation of psychologists at detention centers operating outside of [as in the Geneva Conventions don't apply] or in violation of [as in enhanced interrogations are approved] international law or the Constitution. APA rules require that one percent of the active members’ signatures be obtained on a petition in order to get it submitted to the members for a vote. It took only a matter of weeks to obtain more than the necessary numbers.

The campaign generated amazing grassroots activism. People never before heard from were found emailing their successes in convincing other colleagues to vote. Several brief videos were made by members and distributed on YouTube and Google Video. Two APA divisions lined up in support. Conversation about the referendum on psychologist-run listservs was greater than that on any other topic in memory.

The opposition raised concerns, especially among forensic psychologists; they were concerned that the language could somehow be misunderstood to ban psychologists working in domestic prisons where abuses are prevalent. This possibility was problematic for many referendum supporters. Many of those actively supporting the referendum are deeply concerned about the horrific conditions in much of the U.S. criminal justice system. Yet, it seemed impossible to tackle all issues at once, and the referendum was designed to focus only upon “national security” detainees, held in abusive conditions, with few or no rights. Thus, the referendum sponsors issued a statement that clarified the applicability of the referendum. Nevertheless, this statement failed to allay the concerns of some that the referendum could cost psychologists their jobs.

In an unprecedented development, illustrating the high stakes involved in the potential policy change, the Defense Department issued a press release with “talking points” opposing the referendum. The first two of these talking points unintentionally emphasized the need for the referendum:

“Humane treatment and ensuring detainees are not subjected to cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment is required in accordance with U.S. law.

Behavioral science consultants do NOT support interrogations that aren’t in accordance with applicable law.”

U.S law, as interpreted by the present administration, redefines traditionally proscribed detention and interrogation procedures as “humane” and “legal.” Therefore, referendum supporters pointed out, this requirement to follow “applicable law” does not protect military, or CIA, psychologists from participating in abuses that would be inhumane if judged by international standards.

The referendum ballots went out by mail on August 1^st and were due back on September 15^th. Two days later, the results were announced. The referendum won with 59% of the vote. Furthermore, the turnout, at nearly 15,000 members, was among the highest in any APA election.

The passage of the referendum constitutes a giant step toward creating a united front of health professions opposed to detainee abuse. While the APA referendum policy differs from policy statements by other associations in significant details-its focus on settings as opposed to the interrogations themselves-it follows previous policy statements from the American Medical Association and the American Psychiatric Association opposing participation in interrogations. This united front will increase the pressure on the administration to remove health professionals from their roles aiding these abusive detention policies. It will also escalate the accumulating pressures for a radically different detention policy under the new U.S. presidential administration and Congress next January.

Referendum passage constitutes a giant step forward for those psychologists who have been fighting to change the APA’s policies on involvement in the detention centers. But the struggle of dissident psychologists is far from over. First, there is a disagreement with APA leadership as to when the policy change goes into effect; the leadership claimed initially that the bylaws state that the change doesn’t go into effect till next August, while referendum supporters believe this claim is an egregious misreading of the bylaws. Discussions continue regarding the details of referendum implementation.

Moreover, while the APA’s policy is in the process of changing, the organizational and policy conditions-the culture that allowed the APA to advocate for years in support of psychologist participation in detainee interrogations-have not changed. Activists are focused upon several additional steps to bring about a rejuvenation of their association and their professions.

There is a strong campaign afoot to elect one of the activists as APA President to make sure the new policy is firmly implemented and backed by the organization, as well as to push other efforts making human rights and social justice more central within the profession of psychology. Steven Reisner, a New York psychologist is running an active campaign. In the first nomination phase of the campaign, he received the highest number of votes among the five winning candidates. Passage of the referendum should provide an even stronger boost to his campaign. Ballots go out to the APA membership this October and are due back November 15.

APA members have been deeply disturbed by another prior action of the Association. In 2002, its ethics committee placed a clause in the ethics code, allowing laws, regulations, and government orders to override professional ethics. These members are concerned that the clause provides an offensive loophole that is a variation on the Nuremberg defense – “I was just following orders” – into the ethics code.

The APA Council of Representatives called on the ethics committee to address this problem in 2005. Despite these instructions, the association has resisted clarifying this clause by adding a phrase as simple as “except when violating fundamental human rights”. Other disturbing 2002 modifications to the APA ethics code weakened protections for research participants, such as removing a requirement for informed consent from participants “where otherwise permitted by law or federal or institutional regulations.” Such a clause could, for example, allow experimentation on detainees without their permission, a disturbing violation of professional guidelines and international agreements.

Activist psychologists and their allies also are pushing for accountability for past abuses by psychologists. While some psychologists, including APA members, have been documented to have participated in abuses likely constituting torture, the APA ethics committee has consistently stalled action against or refused to open cases against these psychologists. This needs to stop.

Another form of accountability is a ‘setting right’ of the historical record. Given the known facts regarding psychologists and their roles in detainee abuse, and given the extensive denial of these facta and their significance by APA leadership, it is critical to create a detailed public record of the contributions of psychologists to the dark side over the last seven years. It is imperative that a Psychologist Truth Commission be created that will examine all materials, existing in the public record or available through investigation, and construct such a permanent record. Also necessary is a careful examination of the many other organizational, ethical, and policy issues that allowed the psychological profession and its major professional organization to become complicit in detainee abuse over the last seven years. Clinical psychologists often encourage their clients to face harsh truths. It is similarly necessary for our profession to face these somewhat cold and difficult realities. Only this will prevent us from recreating this sad episode in our profession’s history when the next national or international crisis hits.

The implications of passage of the referendum extend beyond the APA and psychology. The referendum will put additional pressure on the DoD to remove psychologists from their roles aiding interrogations and behavior management. It will also create additional pressure for the development of a mental health system for detainees that is completely isolated from chain of command pressures. While the DoD is not necessarily bound by APA policy, it generally follows professional ethics policies; to do otherwise could make its efforts to recruit and retain psychologists and other professionals substantially more difficult. The implications for the CIA’s “enhanced interrogation” program are less certain, given the secrecy under which that program is conducted. Yet, even there, the APA referendum will increase pressure for a new administration and Congress to shut down the program.”

Finally, passage of the referendum is being heralded by the wider public as a sign of an impending rejection by U.S. citizens of the “dark side” which has taken over so much of our government and country in recent years. This feeling was expressed by the conservative commentator, anti-torture activist, and blogger Andrew Sullivan who headlined his posting on the referendum’s passage with “Know Hope.” Congratulatory emails from around the world have indicated that many find hope in our psychologist colleagues’ rejection of the dark side. “Finally, good news from the U.S.” one email said. These correspondents join us in hoping that this rejection of official torture and abuse will be followed by a wholesale rejection from the American public and government.

He looked at me like I pulled a vacuous, parental crutch out of my ear rather than making an intelligent comment. And of course he was right.

First, wanting to do something or wear something or join in something that most of the other kids are doing, wearing or joining is not as dangerous or life-threatening as jumping off a bridge. Second, how many of us really want our kids to be different than the rest?

Don’t answer that question before really thinking about it. Let’s be honest. How many of us really want our kids to be different?

If you have even half-objectively surveyed the surrounding offices or cubicles at work lately you know the answer, but you don’t want to admit it. Go ahead. Tell the truth. How much upward mobility do nonconformists enjoy at your place of business? What’s their employment expectancy?

They don’t spend enough time yucking it up on the golf course or posing at Starbucks. They’re not reverent or obsequious enough to grovel or flatter their way into the big promotions. They don’t worry enough about vanquishing the next guy (or gal) much less screwing over the easy marks.

Make no mistake. Conformity is a control mechanism that keeps the United Corporations of America sputtering along, unhealthy of course, but productive enough to keep the shareholders comfy. We may not he headed in the right direction, but our lemming-esque locomotion is a marvel of multi-media-induced coordination, social engineering and perpetual, material-assuaged surrender.

We pay lots of lip service to daring to be different and not caring what other people think, but when it comes right down to it, we‘re despicable hypocrites. If we don’t look the right way and say the right things, the wretchedly superficial social circles we covet entry into are inevitably closed to us. If we don’t go along to get along, vocational success eludes our grasp. If we don’t parrot the proper patriotic slogans and dimly accept all those maliciously crafted and incessantly repeated talking points, we’re deemed suspicious or subversive and dismissed by the hapless majority who believe they’re in the know. Heck, if we didn’t vote for Bush a few years back, we were practically traitors.

This is the world we live in. “Jumping off a bridge” used to be considered aberrant behavior, but now it’s the norm. Metaphorically speaking, we jump off bridges every day, because it’s exactly what everyone else is doing, it’s what’s expected of us and we don’t have the courage to deviate from the norm.

If you don’t want your kids jumping off bridges like everyone else, lead by example. Stop agreeing when you disagree. Stop acquiescing when you’re right and they’re wrong. Stop cowering before corrupt or illegitimate powers. Stop trusting news sources that bank on you being an ignorant, manipulable cretin. Stop giving credence to dissenting “authorities” propped up by gainful factions with ulterior motives. Stop simply believing what you want to believe and spend some time discerning what’s believable. Stop preferring short-term gratification to long-term health and sustenance. And stop letting yourself off easy.

We achieved the current catalogue of impending dooms as a reckless species, a careless people and as irresponsible individuals. To thwart our societal plunge, the buck has to stop with you, every one you know and every one you ever knew. Everyone everywhere.

Conformity is the currency of dilapidation. It compromises every aspect of our politics, our lifestyles, our worship and our wellbeing. If, as Einstein put it, insanity is “doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results,” then conformity is at least a little psychotic if not outright insane.

Isn’t it time we acknowledged our psychosis and dealt with it?

Untuck your shirt. Defy instead of defer. Speak truth to panderers.

Until we stop jumping off bridges, our advice to our children is just effective reverse psychology. And the last thing we should be able to stomach is them ending up like us.

The 151-page report issued by a 16-member blue ribbon commission, “Cognitive Neuroscience Research and National Security,” was quietly announced in an August 13 National Academy of Sciences Press Release<.

Commissioned by the Defense Intelligence Agency (DIA), the Pentagon spy shop, the study asserts that the U.S. intelligence “community” must do a better job following cutting-edge research in neuroscience or as is more likely, steering it along paths useful to the Defense Department. According to the NRC,

A 2005 National Research Council report described a methodology for gauging the implications of new technologies and assessing whether they pose a threat to national security. In this new report, the committee applied the methodology to the neuroscience field and identified several research areas that could be of interest to the intelligence community: neurophysiological advances in detecting and measuring indicators of psychological states and intentions of individuals, the development of drugs or technologies that can alter human physical or cognitive abilities, advances in real-time brain imaging, and breakthroughs in high-performance computing and neuronal modeling that could allow researchers to develop systems which mimic functions of the human brain, particularly the ability to organize disparate forms of data. (”National Security Intelligence Organizations should Monitor Advances in Cognitive Neuroscience Research,” National Academy of Sciences, Press Release, August 13, 2008)

Unlocking the secrets of the brain is projected as the next growth industry for the military, academia and corporate grifters hoping to land huge Pentagon contracts. As defense analyst Noah Shachtman reported in Wired, the “Army has given a team of University of California researchers a $4 million grant to study the foundations of “synthetic telepathy.” Unlike “remote viewing” research funded by the CIA and the Defense Intelligence Agency between 1972 and 1996, variously known as “Grill Flame,” “Sun Streak” and finally, “Star Gate” before the plug was pulled, the Army-U.C. Irvine joint venture are exploring thought transmission via a brain-computer mediated interface.

Recently New Scientist reported on a series of bizarre experiments at the University of Reading in the UK. Researchers there have connected 300,000 disembodied rat neurons suspended in “a pink broth of nutrients and antibiotics” to 80 electrodes at the base of the growth medium. As journalist Paul Marks informs us, the “rat neurons have made–and continue to make–connections with each other.” The voltages sparked by the firing cells are displayed on a computer screen.

Welcome to the “brave new world” of neural prosthetics and the militarists who are exploiting science and technology for new weapons applications.

Declaring that emerging technologies such as brain imaging and cognitive and physical enhancers are “desired by the public,” NRC avers “such forces act as strong market incentives for development.” But as Rick Weiss cautions on the Science Progress blog,

But even more interesting to me is the report’s discussion of the emerging market in brain-targeted, performance-degrading techniques. Some experiments, it turns out, suggest that magnetic beams can be used to induce seizures in people, a tempting addition to the military’s armamentarium. More conventionally, as scientists discover new chemicals that can blur thinking or undermine an enemy’s willpower, and as engineers design aerosolized delivery systems that can deliver these chemicals directly to the lungs (and from there, the brains) of large groups of people, the prospect of influencing the behavior of entire enemy regiments becomes real. (”Minding Mental Minefields,” Science Progress, August 15, 2008)

The use of so-called calmative agents as non-lethal weapons are already under development. As Antifascist Calling reported last month in “The Calmative Before the Storm,” the Pentagon’s Joint Non-Lethal Weapons Directorate (JNLWD) are carrying out experiments into what it euphemistically calls “Human Effects Research” and developing an “Advanced Total Body Model for predicting the effects of non-lethal impacts.”

Apparently the DIA has taken this a step further and will now explore the possibility of creating aerosolized pharmacological agents that can disrupt and perhaps influence, the mental functioning of targeted populations abroad, enemy soldiers or dissenting citizens here in the United States.

Neil Davison, a researcher with the Bradford Disarmament Research Centre (BDRC) at Bradford University in the UK, wrote an important 2007 study, “‘Off the Rocker’ and ‘On the Floor’: The Continued Development of Biochemical Incapacitating Weapons.” Davison examined the historical differentiation made by weaponeers between “off the rocker” agents such as LSD, PCP and psilocybin in their allegedly weaponized forms versus “on the floor” agents such as sedatives, opiate analgesics and anesthetic chemicals.

During the “golden age” of the CIA and U.S. Army’s quixotic search for “mind control” agents during the 1950s and 1960s, researchers were seeking a reliable mechanism that would unlock the secrets of the mind–and gain control over witting or unwitting subjects–for intelligence and counterintelligence purposes. Hundreds, if not thousands, of unethical experiments were carried out on psychiatric patients, civilians and soldiers. The results were subsequently suppressed on grounds on “national security.”

While the majority of CIA MKULTRA files were ordered destroyed by former Agency Director Richard Helms in 1973, the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence held landmark 1977 hearings and issued a report, “Project MKULTRA, The CIA’s Program of Research in Behavioral Modification.” As Senator Ted Kennedy discussed in his opening remarks,

Some 2 years ago, the Senate Health Subcommittee heard chilling testimony about the human experimentation activities of the Central Intelligence Agency. The Deputy Director of the CIA revealed that over 30 universities and institutions were involved in an “extensive testing and experimentation” program which included covert drug tests on unwitting citizens “at all social levels, high and low, native Americans and foreign.” Several of these tests involved the administration of LSD to “unwitting subjects in social situations.” …

We believed that the record, incomplete as it was, was as complete as it was going to be. Then one individual, through a Freedom of Information request, accomplished what two U.S. Senate committees could not. He spurred the agency into finding additional records pertaining to the CIA’s program of experimentation with human subjects. … The records reveal a far more extensive series of experiments than had previously been thought. Eighty-six universities or institutions were involved. New instances of unethical behavior were revealed.

The Central Intelligence Agency drugged American citizens without their knowledge or consent. It used university facilities and personnel without their knowledge. It funded leading researchers, often without their knowledge. (emphasis added)

While the CIA’s MKULTRA project and related Army ventures carried out at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases (USAMRIID) at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, may have failed to develop specific agents that could be wielded as a “mind control” weapon, the research did result in the development of abusive interrogation techniques that can only be characterized as torture.

As Antifascist Calling queried in “Neuroscience, National Security & the ‘War on Terror’,” “If behavioral psychology was handmaid to the horrors perpetrated at Guantánamo Bay, Abu Ghraib and CIA transnational ‘black sites,’ what new nightmares are in store for humanity when advances in neuroscience, complex computer algorithms and a secretive national security state enter stage (far) right?”

Apparently horrors of the “mind control” variety, particularly when it comes to applications for ever-newer and more insidious interrogation/control techniques to be used on “enemy combatants” or dissenting malefactors in the heimat.

According to the NRC and the corporate-academic grifters involved in the research, cognitive warfare should be sold as a “more humane” method of advancing imperialist objectives. As the report baldly states, the equation “pills instead of bullets” will be the preferred marketing technique employed for “selling” the program to the American people. As anthropologist Hugh Gusterson wrote,

The military and scientific leaders chartering neuroweapons research will argue that the United States is a uniquely noble country that can be trusted with such technologies, while other countries (except for a few allies) cannot. They will also argue that these technologies will save lives and that U.S. ingenuity will enable the United States to dominate other countries in a neuroweapons race. When it is too late to turn back the clock, they will profess amazement that other countries caught up so quickly and that an initiative intended to ensure American dominance instead led to a world where everyone is threatened by chemicalized soldiers and roboterrorists straight out of Blade Runner. (The militarization of neuroscience,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 April 2007)

But as the world looked on in horror at Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, this “uniquely noble country” guided by “ethical principles,” resorted to repugnant methods such as sensory deprivation, near drowning and “self-inflicted pain” techniques (short-shackling and the like) to achieve control over defenseless prisoners.

As the NRC would have it, academics in thrall to corporate funding and state agencies staffed by war criminals now expect us to believe that “ethics” will guide those exploring pharmacological methods to obtain more insidious means to subjugate humanity.

Weiss reports that the NRC notes in its report, the motivation, or lack thereof, to fight, is of great concern to Pentagon bureaucrats and policy makers. “So one question,” for military-corporate-academic funded research “would be, ‘How can we disrupt the enemy’s motivation to fight?’ Other questions raised by controlling the mind: ‘How can we make people trust us more?’ ‘What if we could help the brain to remove fear or pain?’ ‘Is there a way to make the enemy obey our commands?’…As cognitive neuroscience and related technologies become more pervasive, using technology for nefarious purposes becomes easier.”

But as is usual with all such screeds, the psychoanalytic theory of projection comes in handy when deciphering the monstrous intent of Pentagon weaponeers. It is all-too-clear whether we are discussing nuclear, biological, chemical or contemporaneously, cognitive weapons that Western proponents of preemptive war, always couch their acts of violent imperialist aggression in purely defensive terms.

In this light, Freud and his followers have defined projection as a form of defense in which unwanted feelings are displaced onto another person, and where aggressive impulses then appear as a threat from the external world. In the case of corporate defense and security grifters, their militarist pit bulls and the academic sycophants who fuel their deranged “cognitive warfare” fantasies, the other–a nation, a dispossessed class or a bogeyman such as “international terrorism”–are always the external harbingers of apocalyptic death and destruction, when in reality such fantasies are wholly reflective of their own desire to aggressively dominate and plunder other nations.

Therefore, the NRC maintains, and note the ideologically-skewed reference to the eternal verities of “the market,” the Holy Grail of capitalism in its hyperimperialist phase:

The fear that this approach to fighting war might be developed will be justification for developing countermeasures to possible cognitive weapons. This escalation might lead to innovations that could cause this market area to expand rapidly. Tests would need to be developed to determine if a soldier had been harmed by a cognitive weapon. And there would be a need for a prophylactic of some sort. (NRC, op. cit.)

Who, pray tell, is driving this “escalation” and counting on academia to produce “innovations” in “this market area”? One might also quite reasonably inquire: Who profits?

As Christopher Green, the chairman of the NRC investigative panel championing neuroweapons research avers in a roundtable discussion sponsored by the Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists,

Big Pharma is global. Drug discovery research is both ponderous (not as much as arms control, however) and increasingly beyond the control of governments and the public. The development of cognitive enhancers and anti-aging aides during the next two decades (the time needed for drug discovery to become successful) will be… ethically worrisome. But it will be beyond opprobrium. Drugs will be developed and marketed, and not necessarily under the auspices of traditional Western controls and good laboratory practices. (”The potential impact of neuroscience research is greater than previously thought,” Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists, 9 July 2008) [emphasis added]

While Green claims he is opposed to developing drugs “with safe and efficacious properties for military use,” the NRC study, after all, was funded by the Defense Intelligence Agency, hardly a “neutral party” when it comes to “enhanced interrogation techniques” and other horrors of this horrible system!

One must also dissect the linguistic formulations and assumptions deployed by those advocating this line of research. By referring to neuroweapons production as a “market area,” those contemplating unleashing devilish pharmacological forms of warfare on unsuspecting populations behave, in you’ll pardon the pun, as if they were brainstorming the release of a new video game or suite of luxury condominiums in an American city “ethnically cleansed” of its urban poor!

Green and his acolytes claim that “battlefield commanders of all nations hold sacrosanct the right to determine the applications” of weapon deployments that may cause “collateral damage” to civilian noncombatants. Therefore, Green argues that “if governments or scientists were to try to develop a system to pre-screen neuroscientific cognitive manipulators, which would be HIPAA approved and tested, and robust in its core science, success would be as likely as it was with mines and cluster-bombs–meaning not likely.” Translation: full-speed ahead!

While the NRC allege that their approach to monitoring neuroweapons research is “ethical,” the committee ponders whether “the concept of torture could also be altered by products in this market. It is possible that someday there could be a technique developed to extract information from a prisoner that does not have any lasting side effects.”

Other than the hollowing-out of one’s personality and the unique traits that make us human, that is. “Paging Winston Smith, white courtesy telephone!”

While Nazi theories of Aryan superiority may have been displaced by a uniquely American ultranationalist, though no less predatory utilitarian praxis, behind the glittering technological promises trumpeted by today’s biotech weaponeers lurk the same murderous mental constructs that guided Indian hunters and slave traders of yore.

Only this time, we’re all Manchurian candidates.

After reviewing the disturbing background of psychologists crucial role in U.S. torture and detainee abuse, the referendum’s crucial clause states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in isolation of, either International law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

Jean Maria Arrigo, the psychologist who served on the APA’s PENS [Psychological Ethics and National Security] task force in 2005 and exposed the PENS report as a rubber stamp for an already determined government policy, has succinctly explained the importance of a “Yes” vote on the referendum:

The ballot arrived today from APA, and I just voted Yes on the Referendum. To my mind, the timeliness of the Referendum as social action supersedes the problem of misinterpretation of the text.

My thinking on this matter has been most strongly influenced by military and intelligence personnel I know, including senior interrogators.

At an emotional level, I was much affected by audience responses to my February presentations to anti-torture symposia at two universities in Sao Paulo and the regional psychological association. Audiences were outraged by the APA endorsement of psychologists at military interrogation centers (people standing up and shouting) and truly horrified that I had agreed to the PENS report. (In Brazil, the word “interrogation” is virtually synonymous with “torture.”) If the APA leadership accommodates current government policy on interrogations, well, Brazilian psychologists can understand…, but if the APA membership defeats the Referendum, at this point in our history, that sends a bad message I cannot explain away. They are worried about the passivity of the APA legitimizing torture by our government, which legitimizes torture by their government and delegitimizes their own protests as psychologists.

Respectfully,

Jean Maria Arrigo

In response to the rferendum, the APA has launched a strong effort to convince members that they should not support this “well-intended” referendum because it would restrict the ability of psychologists to work in domestic prisons and mental hospitals. Although legally informed psychologists have opined that any such risk is extremely far fetched, the referendum authors have issued a clarifying statement that would put these concerns to rest for those sincerely concerned about the domestic application of the referendum:

This referendum is focused on settings such as Guantánamo Bay and the CIA ‘black sites’ set up by the U.S. as part of its ‘global war on terror’; settings where the persons being detained are denied the protections of either constitutional or international law, settings which have been denounced by the United Nations, the Council of Europe, and the International Committee of the Red Cross.

We are well aware of the harms and legal struggles facing certain prisons and jails inside the domestic U.S. criminal justice system. However, the referendum takes no position on such settings where prisoners have full access to independent counsel and constitutional protections; nor does the referendum take a position on settings that now exist within the domestic mental health system where clients and patients also possess these basic rights.

The campaign of confusion has, however, only intensified since this clarification was issued.

Psychologist and attorney Bryant Welch, who founded the organization’s Practice Directorate and then served as its Executive Director for eight years, has himself penned a piece explaining what is at stake in this referendum [included here with permission]:

Vote to End the Shame APA has Inflicted on all Psychologists

By Bryant L. Welch, J.D., Ph.D.

In the eyes of the world psychologists are being seen as aiders and abettors of torture. The damage to the profession grows day by day, and the shamefulness of it reflects on all of us, whether we like it or not.

This is the third consecutive annual convention in which APA has presented new reasons for refusing to explicitly state that psychologists are not to participate in detention centers where torture is being used. In 2006 we were told, among many things, that torture was not occurring, and that it was sufficient for APA to reiterate its 1986 resolution “opposing torture.” Last year we were told that psychologists’ presence at the detention centers was actually necessary to prevent the torture whose very existence these same APA officials denied the previous year. Bizarrely, APA outlawed nineteen specific forms of torture, as if in some way the large number of proscribed techniques would cripple torture efforts.

As a result, for the first time in APA history, APA rank and file members have secured the necessary signatures to petition the APA and force APA to submit the torture issue to a referendum by the membership.

Persisting in its support for psychologists’ participation in Bush detention centers and appearing insensitive to the moral concerns of its members, APA leaders are now advising APA members to oppose the referendum because the language of the referendum might be interpreted to preclude psychologists working in certain institutional settings. This argument is based on scenarios that are extremely far fetched and could readily be addressed even were they to occur. To the public, of course, the message would be that psychologists are not willing to stop torture now if there is even a remote risk of losing jobs in the future.

Since the Bush Administration will be out of office by the next time APA meets, this will be the last opportunity psychologists will have to remove this terrible stain from our reputation and our history

Torture is not a nuanced issue.

Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.

For more information see Why Did the American Psychological Association Do It?.

Several nationally prominent and respected organizations which have long been active in the anti-torture struggle have spoken out in support of the referendum. The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International has issued this statement in support:

The Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC) is an organization each of whose members is a survivor of torture. Our mission is two-fold: to support torture survivors in any way we can and to oppose torture wherever it may be practiced.

We understand the petition submitted by Ethical APA Psychologists to be entirely consistent with this mission. That such a petition is necessary seems, at the very least, distressing but since it is, we express our support for it and thank psychologists for this action.

In solidarity,
Harold Nelson
Advocacy Coordinator
Torture Abolition and Survivors Support Coalition International (TASSC)

www.tassc.org

School of the Americas Watch also has expressed support for the referendum:

We at School of the Americas Watch are all too familiar with the practice of institutional secrecy in which torture and brutality thrives. We therefore recognize and support the vital role that Psychologists for Social Responsibility and Psychologists for an Ethical APA have played in the fight to end torture and other human rights abuses.

We further support Psychologists for an Ethical APA’s petition and referendum with the American Psychological Association (APA). We urge the American Psychological Association to put an end to the unhealthy relationship between psychology and the torture by removing all APA psychologists from the secret detention centers where torture and cruelty prevail. We stand in solidarity with all of those psychologists who are working to advance human rights throughout the world and who support survivors of torture.

Mike Baney
Operations and Development Coordinator
School of the Americas Watch, Washington, DC

www.soaw.org

TASSC and School of the Americas Watch understand all too clearly what is at stake here. Let’s hope that, despite the campaign of confusion and fear, the members of the APA grasp this opportunity to heed the words of Drs. Welch and Arrigo and vote for this referendum. This would send a strong message to those in the forefront of the anti-torture struggle — like TASSC and School of the Americas Watch — that psychologists will no longer give their tacit or active consent to torture and other detainee abuse. Neither the profession nor the country can afford to miss this opportunity to issue a rebuke to the Bush administration and to those in our profession who have abetted it. As Dr. Welch states: “Vote No to torture. Vote YES on the referendum.”