As Stephen Soldz, one of the supporters of an anti-torture referendum resolution now being mailed out to members of the American Psychological Association, reports:
The APA has launched a strong effort at spin and disinformation regarding the referendum. Unfortunately, some of our colleagues who should support this efforts have also parsed the text in such a way as to perceive a potential threat.
Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation 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.
Among the many revelations from Ron Suskind's book, Think Progress found this:
Usman is trundled from the SUV, escorted through the West Gate, and onto the manicured grounds. No one speaks as the agents walk him behind the gate’s security station, down a stairwell, along an underground passage, and into a room — cement-walled box with a table, two chairs, a hanging light with a bare bulb, and a mounted video camera. Even after all the astonishing turns of the past hour, Usman can’t quite believe there’s actually an interrogation room beneath the White House, dark and dank and horrific.
The "Usman" in question was a Pakistani national whose crime was "fiddling with his I-Pod" in Washington...
"From the Department of Justice to Guantanamo Bay: Administration Lawyers and Administration Interrogation Rules" is the official title of the House hearings.
"Detainee Interrogation Techniques" was used for the Senate hearings.
I'm going to call them what they really seems to be, the "WAR CRIMES HEARINGS".
Below the fold follow links to the C-SPAN library (an awesome resource) programs of the series of three House hearings and two Senate hearings, and their respective summaries and witness lists.
HOUSE:
Part I: 2 hours, 22 minutes
Part II: 1 hour, 39 minutes
Part III: 2 hours, 53 minutes
Thomas Nephew at newsrackblog attended a Human Rights First session the other day which he described as follows:
Human Rights First has brought together about twenty pros with significant interrogation experience this week to lobby Congress and the presidential campaigns, and to speak to the public about what works and what doesn't when it comes to gaining credible intelligence -- as opposed to unreliable information -- from interrogations.
This ain't a primary diary and I apologize for interrupting the frenzy, but it's important...
The AP is reporting that John Yoo, former AG John Ashcroft and former Assistant AG Daniel Levin have all agreed to testify before Congress about military interrogations. Tenet is still in negotiations and David Addington (Darth Cheney's Chief of Staff) is supposedly still considering whether to appear. It looks, though, like a subpoena has been authorized for him already, probably anticipating a refusal to appear.
Recent revelations raise questions about the role of health providers at US detention facilities. Thus, the Washington Post reported that detainees are being involuntarily drugged. Almerindo Ojeda provides additional evidence that health providers at Guantánamo aided interrogators to the detriment of detainees.
On last night's episode of The Daily Show a significant amount of coverage was given to the recent story about White House meetings on interrogation techniques. Jon Stewart, in his usual fashion, does not hold back at all.
The segment is followed by an interview with Jack Goldsmith, author of "The Terror Presidency". This is great and important television.
The man in the Oval Office calls it an "enhanced interrogation technique," as in
interrogation n 1: a sentence of inquiry that asks for a reply
but it's hard to see how stuffing a gag in someone's mouth is going to improve the quality of the questions or, for that matter, facilitate better answers.
They served in the same battalion in Iraq at the same time. Kayla Williams spoke with Alyssa Peterson about the young woman's troubles a week before she died--and afterward, attended her memorial service. Williams even has her own Iraq interrogation horror story to tell. So what, in Williams's view, caused Alyssa Peterson to put a bullet in her head in September 2003 after just a few weeks in Iraq? And why were the press and the public not told about it?
The death of Alyssa Peterson, which I chronicled here last month (and others have done before), is unspeakably sad, and what was fully in her mind will never be known, especially since her parents apparently knew little about her death until years after it happened. The press, which has rarely challenged the official version of Iraq fatalities, has not probed the incident, to this day (although it is featured in two chapters in my new book on Iraq and the media). But this tragedy also begs the question: Which interrogation techniques drew her ire?
And were they of such a nature that this might explain why this young woman of Mormon faith and, reportedly, good nature would suddenly turn a gun on herself?
YELLOW SPRINGS, Ohio - Republican presidential candidate John McCain said President Bush should veto a measure that would bar the CIA from using waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods on terror suspects.
McCain voted against the bill, which would restrict the CIA to using only the 19 interrogation techniques listed in the Army field manual.
His vote was controversial because the manual prohibits waterboarding — a simulated drowning technique that McCain also opposes — yet McCain doesn't want the CIA bound by the manual and its prohibitions.
I am a student at Washington University in St. Louis, which is hosting Alberto Gonzales tomorrow for a speech here on campus. Due to my progressive views, an acquaintance of mine in the College Republicans has invited me and 20 other Wash U students to meet with Alberto tomorrow before his speech to ask him anything we want. I initially said "sure" to my contact, seeing this as a pretty unique opportunity to grill Gonzales on whatever I wanted. However, now I need your help and creativity to figure out what I should do!
Negroponte, who currently serves as deputy secretary of state, told the National Journal that the country has made improvements and that it has been years since interrogators used the simulated drowning technique, often described as torture.
"We've taken steps to address the issue of interrogations, for instance, and waterboarding has not been used in years," Negroponte told the magazine.
"It wasn't used when I was director of national intelligence, not even for a few years before that."
He was Director of National Intelligence from 2005 to 2007.
When he says "not even for a few years before that", what does he mean? Three years? Two years? Does it matter? Maybe he's using this to split those hairs:
When the Justice Department publicly declared torture "abhorrent" in a legal opinion in December 2004, the Bush administration appeared to have abandoned its assertion of nearly unlimited presidential authority to order brutal interrogations.
But soon after Alberto Gonzales's arrival as attorney general in February 2005, the Justice Department issued another opinion, this one in secret. It was a very different document, according to officials briefed on it, an expansive endorsement of the harshest interrogation techniques ever used by the Central Intelligence Agency.
The new opinion, the officials said, for the first time provided explicit authorization to barrage terror suspects with a combination of painful physical and psychological tactics, including head-slapping, simulated drowning and frigid temperatures.
Well, consider the source. It's Mr. Death Squads talking, so what else would we expect?
I’m sending a letter off to the American Psychological Association (APA) explaining my decision to resign membership from that organization, stimulated by APA's failure to address the torture issue. The text of the letter follows below (with hypertext links added here to assist the reader with context).
++++++++++++++++++++++++++
January 27, 2008
Alan E. Kazdin, Ph.D.
President, American Psychological Association
750 First Street, NE
Washington, DC 20002-4232
Dear Dr. Kazdin,
I hereby resign my membership in the American Psychological Association (APA). I have up until now been working with Psychologists for an Ethical APA for an overturn in APA policy on psychologist involvement in national security interrogations, and I greatly respect those who are fighting via a dues boycott to influence APA policy on this matter. I hope to still work with these principled and dedicated professionals, but I cannot do it anymore from a position within APA.
Tomorrow, a California State Senate Select Committee is holding a hearing on the Ridley-Thomas Resolution which would require California licensing agencies to send letters to their health professional licensees to inform them that participation in abusive detainee treatment and coercive interrogations could be subject to prosecution. I described this bill last week. Now, the president of Physicians for Human Rights (PHR) has written to State Senator Ridley-Thomas offering full support for this important piece of legislation.
All opponents of state-sponsored torture and abusive interrogations should support this bill, and put maximum pressure on California legislators to vote this bill into law. Additionally, with the presidential campaign headed for a February primary showdown in 20 states, including California, all candidates should tell us where they stand on this potentially landmark bill.
This article details how U.S. forces and their Iraqi allies organize counterinsurgency operations against Iraqi prisoners, now numbering in the tens of thousands. No matter how they label and package it, it's counterinsurgency operations that are being described. And it was the special place of "behavioral specialists" in this plan that caught my attention. So please pardon this prefatory diversion into the world of science politics.
Psychologists at the American Psychological Association (APA) have been fighting for their place at the governmental funding table for decades now. A good part of what passes for politics in the field of behavioral sciences concerns the contest between psychologists and their institutional rivals (psychiatrists, and other types of behavioral "specialists"), most recently over the spoils of the lavishly-funded post-9/11 "war on terror". The internal split within APA over how or if psychologists should participate in CIA "black site" interrogations, and other such collaboration with U.S. torture, has roiled that organization.
THE CIA chief who ordered the destruction of secret videotapes recording the harsh interrogation of two top Al-Qaeda suspects has indicated he may seek immunity from prosecution in exchange for testifying before the House intelligence committee.
Jose Rodriguez, former head of the CIA’s clandestine service, is determined not to become the fall guy in the controversy over the CIA’s use of torture, according to intelligence sources.
