How Doctors Got Into the Torture Business and an astounding
An Interview with Steven Miles: The torture-endangered Society
From the second link:
There seem to be things Americans need to believe about themselves that require that we filter certain facts out of our awareness. In my work with the Hoover archives at Stanford, I came across documentation from an authoritative source who named 10 specific countries with which we partner in torture. We may not be the ones turning on the electricity, but our people are present when it happens. He claims this did not begin with 9/11.
Another source discussed the use of children in those experiments done decades ago.
Follow me over the bump into the mouth of madness:
From the second link cont...
Its interesting that there was a certain coyness about the data that came out of Iraq. The photographs that have been released so far are all photographs of men. Photographs of women have been retained and have not been released by the media sources that have them.
Sy Hersh said the other photos are much worse. He mentioned audio recordings of children screaming while being sodomized.
All of the prisoner deaths that have been included in official tabulations, which are admittedly incomplete -- curiously, you find references to the death of children by the Department of Defense only in footnotes. There is no reporting of kids' deaths in official lists or in death certificates or anything else. So there are sets of this data that remain hidden. The data has obviously been scrubbed.
What have you seen ?
I have seen the footnotes referring to the kids' deaths and have seen credible evidence of sexual abuse described in Army investigations. I have not seen photos. I do not need to see them, but I have seen investigators' reports.
Steve, aren't we describing war crimes ?
Yes. We are describing war crimes and I think its important to name them for what they are for a couple of reasons. First, when you name it as a war crime, you hint at the reality of the things we have described, the gravity of the harms that have occurred. Second, in describing it as a war crime you also describe accurately the transgressions against a framework of justice and the damage to the civil order that would be avoided by pretending these are not war crimes. I think thats important to do.
Living in the US under a bought and paid for government that performs barbarisms in my name is a type of (much lesser) torture in itself.
This just has me heart sick today... America has not only lost it's soul, it's lost it's fucking mind.
Book Review: A Question of Torture
Those of us who have been horrified by American atrocities committed at locations such as Abu Ghraib and Guantánamo Bay, and have wondered how the US became a notorious perpetrator of torture will want to read McCoy's (2006) latest book, A Question of Torture. What McCoy provides is a scholarly and readable historical account of the CIA'?s role as an innovator of modern torture techniques beginning in the late 1940s and continuing on to the present.
McCoy's book highlights early efforts by the CIA to research mind control drugs in response to allegations that the Soviet Union was pioneering the use of these drugs as part of its own interrogation regimen. A number of years of research on a variety of psychoactive drugs, including LSD, failed to yield an effective mind control drug that could elicit information from suspected spies.
Of more pertinence to psychologists is McCoy's coverage of the shift in focus by the CIA from developing mind control drugs to researching key behavioral components of psychological torture. The ground-breaking work by psychologist D.O. Hebb on sensory deprivation in particular would inspire many of the torture techniques currently utilized by US-run military prisons. The second key element that was researched and developed by CIA-backed psychological research was self-inflicted pain based upon techniques pioneered by the KGB (such as forced postures for lengthy periods of time). The third key element of interest to the CIA regarded the situational factors needed to produce torturers. As McCoy notes, in Stanley Milgram's (1974) research on destructive obedience-- research that turned out to be funded covertly by the CIA - demonstrated that practically anyone could be turned into a torturer. These elements would be refined by the CIA and put into practice beginning in the 1960s.
One thing that McCoy covers in his chapter on psychological research is the persistent lapses in ethics. Many human participants in these various experiments were subjected to sensory deprivation and self-inflicted pain techniques served involuntarily and had no means of escaping the experimental environment. Psychiatric patients and prisoners in particular were targeted for such experimentation. Experiments relying on voluntary human participants often failed to provide adequate informed consent to these individuals, as in the case of Milgram's experiments on obedience. As McCoy notes, the negative psychological consequences (such as amnesia) for human participants as a result of being exposed to extreme sensory deprivation or self-inflicted pain was often long-lasting (even in experiments relying on voluntary participation).
McCoy goes on in subsequent chapters to outline how the CIA put these new torture techniques into practice, as well as efforts to export these techniques to various other US client states, as well as the human toll exacted on the victims. In addition McCoy provides us with a context for understanding the persistence of the use of psychological torture in the years after the end of the Cold War, as the US government shifted ultimately to a new War on Terror. Although some effort was made by the US government in the 1990s to cease the use of torture, the aftermath of the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks provided cover for torture'?s advocates including Alberto Gonzales (now Attorney General), John Yoo, Donald Rumsfeld, and General Geoffrey Miller.
McCoy closes the book with a summary of the effectiveness of torture. The bottom line is that at least two millennia of experience in practicing torture in its various forms have failed to yield accurate information from its victims. In fact, McCoy suggests that the persistent reliance on torture is more of a reflection of the psychological needs of government leaders in times of crisis than as a means of pursuing truth.
For psychologists desiring a historical context within which to place the US government's current use of torture and who desire the context within which the current debate within the psychological profession regarding appropriate (pdf) ethical guidelines for psychologists working in military prisons, McCoy's book is an excellent resource.
doctors and war crimes? Robert Jay Lifton has written an essential book about that.
unfortunately, "war crime" is a fluid concept, after 9-11, just like "torture". the current American President clearly thinks to have inherent authority to define these terms himself, no matter what the rest of the world -- not even Congress -- thinks.
hence, a political discussion of "war crimes" recently perpetrated by the USA is by definition moot. a classic example of war crime: preemptively attacking a sovereign nation. but that was a pre 9-11 thing, it was a Nuremberg idea. the US administration has deemed such rules and definitions to be obsolete, in the War Against Terror. you're only left with outrage if you don't agree with the Bush/Cheney game plan. but outrage has not reached critical mass (Yet*), in the USA nor will it manage to accomplish that anytime soon.
Americans who don't like what their nation has become as of late, ie a nation where torture is official government policy, , have really little to do. American voters do not consider these issues to be a priority -- there are bigger fish to fry in US electoral politics, such as gay marriage, the destroyed content of Terry Schiavo's skull, and four cases of flag-burning. torture is politically radioactive because talking about it makes the Democrats look pro-terrorist, it doesn't make the Republicans look like nail-rippers. wedge issues such as these keep the dems distracted and on the defence. I see no hope.
Most Americans-- even the highly and roundly educated-- have absolutely no realistic understanding of what torture is.
Indeed, the majority are so far removed from what is taking place both at home and abroad as to be maddening. I'm reminded of a Colin Wilson quote, in that "The average man is a conformist, accepting miseries and disasters with the stoicism of a cow standing in the rain."
To be brutally honest I see no hope, no hope in the democrats saving us, we are too far down the road; Nov 06 will change nothing in and of the system. I'm reminded of systems thinking and organizational change theory. Afterall, watching the kelptocrat's both repub and demo fleese our nation for the last thirty years continually, stratify and compartmentalising us against each other and ourselves watching the demo move further and further to the right in big money deep pockets while the right move even futher to the right, where it seems the system is starting to eat itself.
Which is a classic symptom of a closing society.
Open systems are freqently capable of change and resist entropy. They can be said to practice creative self-destruction. open systems which is what we certainly haven't had in a long time, are neglected until the system breaks-down or discentagrates. Trying to change a system (like our political system) by changing its content is called First Order Change. In this case, people try to change what an individual element does, try to reorganize a specific organization, or change the people who work for an organization. These types of change alter only the look of the system, not its actual behavior. It is called "rearranging deck chairs on the Titanic." However you arrange the chairs, the ship will still sink.
Homeostasis is an unconscious process by which systems seek to maintain the status quote. All elements within the system interact to keep the system from changing. Any effort toward system change will result in homeostatic responses from within the system to block the change. Most system change strategies tend to fail because they do not address the interactions within the system. When a change effort fails, (which it has again and again)the most common response is to try the same (or the same type) of strategy again. A forever feed-back loop that stagnates and falls anyway.
To understand a system, study its content, to change a system study its context.
I feel what the good intentions of the progresives and open minded people here at the dkos and elsewhere seem to get caught up in is study of content and not it's context.
If you'll forgive the bumper sticker-ism, "If the followers lead, the leaders will follow." and that is what it is going to take. Massive solidarity across the Nation, and massive strikes. It is our only change now. We have to save ourselves no one will come for us. It will be an honest struggle. There is no hope. Only action.
"The more I understand hope, the more I realize that all along it deserved to be in the box with the plagues, sorrow, and mischief; that it serves the needs of those in power as surely as belief in a distant heaven; that hope is really nothing more than a secular way of keeping us in line.
Hope is, in fact, a curse, a bane. I say this not only because of the lovely Buddhist saying "Hope and fear chase each other's tails," not only because hope leads us away from the present, away from who and where we are right now and toward some imaginary future state. I say this because of what hope is."
I'm reminded, constantly, of the <strike> two-year</strike> three and a half year old remark by the anonymous State Department official: "I just wake up in the morning and tell myself, 'There's been a military coup,' and then it all makes sense."
Bush's war is not only abroad the war,
Is a War on you. The American people. You are the enemy
I have sd, before and I say again, People! "It feels like America is unraveling"...
Because it is...
One link above talks about how the studies into mind control that has been implemented on our own troops and the general population. Examples abound, what with the Pentagon performing psyops directed at the American public to improving the "kill ratio" of our troops. Enough there for its own post (think: the mind control that the billion $ PR industry buys to control "we the people"). You are the enemy everbit as much as al kadur
Ahhh, Saudade
The Portuguese word "saudade", loosely translated,denotes "longing", "melancholy", or "nostalgia." In the context of Portuguese, however, the term connotes a meaning that is irrevocably lost in translation. In his book In Portugal of 1912, A.F.G Bell makes a few disquisitional remarks on the meaning of "saudade" given its intended context:
"The famous saudade of the Portuguese is a vague and constant desire for something that does not and probably cannot exist, for something other than the present, a turning towards the past or towards the future; not an active discontent or poignant sadness but an indolent dreaming wistfulness."
Whereas a decontextualized reading of the "saudade" insinuates a rather dreary and destitute nostalgia for an impossible object, Bell's recontextualization posits saudade's meaning as a nostalgic yearning for an impossible object, only slightly tinged with the hues of melancholia.
Saudade is something you feel about somebody or a special place. Maybe it is some kind ill erotographomania I get on bourbon filled lonely nights, that pains me to watch as my ideals of this country becomes what I fear. It is sad when we lose our illusions. The bottom drops out and leaves us disenchanted. When German movie director Wim Wenders wrote of America, in that, "America" always means two things: a country, geographically, the USA, and an idea of that country which goes with it. [The] "American Dream", then, is a dream of a country in a different country that is located where the dream takes place... "I want to be in America", the Jets sing, in that famous song from West Side Story. They are in America already and yet still wanting to get there. (Wim Wenders 1989, quoted in Morley 96, p. 94)., it make me want to weep. The dark night of the soul or chapel perilous, as it's sometimes know as, shouldn't be something A NATION gets stuck in. I want to be proud of my country, however it has been highjacked by jackels.
The great W.H. Auden said "The so-called traumatic experience is not an accident, but the opportunity for which we all have been patiently waiting - had it not occurred, it would have found another- in order that life come a serious matter." "My American" now reads like a death certificate. It presents itself now as a cautionary tale, as a list of ingredients in a witches' brew, it reads as a coroner's report, or a message on a sandwich-board worn by a wild-eyed man who states, "The end of the world is at hand." It is a hoarse voice in the dark that croaks, "Beware . . . beware . . . beware."
Human nature, being what it is, is prone to delusions and self-righteousness. The Federal Transportation and Safety Administation once commissioned forensic anthropologist Clyde Snow to perform a study of how to improve airline safety by examining the behaviour of passengers during airplane crashes. What he found and reported was that a grown man in a burning room consistently demonstrates no compunction about stepping on the face of an infant that blocks his access to an exit. The FTSA refused to publish the report or to believe that human beings would act that way. Oh how I long for humanity.
The essay's and links and responses of late, come from the results of people who are not currently suffering from deprivation in any physical sense. They are people whose self-worth and lives are based upon abstractions such as the accumulation of capital or "family values" and are, therefore, meaningless if stripped of an imagined nobility.
Arguments will not tear down that construct and they will fight tooth and nail (on paper) to rationalise how they are above such baseness as survival. Console yourself with the fact that reality has more powerful tools than rhetoric at its disposal to tear down delusions and for all of their self-congratulations, those people are one crisis away from becoming those unfortunates that they look down upon.
not everyone reverted to Hobbesian behaviours when the ordure hit the fan on 911.
If there is any hope it is that we have to save ourselves, no one not even the dems can do it now.
*yet; my waning hope is that this diary will spark an awakening in the dkos community and others and by proxy, humanity.