If behavioral scientists are concerned solely with advancing their science, it seems most probably that they will serve the purposes of whatever individual or group has the power.

The quote above is from U.S. psychology pioneer Carl Rogers. It is worth pondering his statement as we consider both recent developments in the fight against U.S. torture, and more general considerations about the role of psychologists, physicians, and other scientific and medical personnel in interrogations for Bush's "War on Terror."

I was reading the New York Times's article on the decision by the "Convening Authority" at Guantanamo to drop all charges "without prejudice" against purported sixth 9/11 Al Qaeda hijacker Mohammed al-Qahtani, when my attention was drawn to an ad from the CIA trumpeting the announcement that they were seeking applicants for "National Clandestine Service Careers."

"I do solemnly swear (or affirm) that I will support and defend the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California against all enemies, foreign and domestic; that I will bear true faith and allegiance to the Constitution of the United States and the Constitution of the State of California; that I take this obligation freely, without any mental reservation or purpose of evasion; and that I will well and faithfully discharge the duties upon which I am about to enter."

Article XX, Section 3 of the California Constitution, § 1360 Necessity of taking constitutional oath

I thank People for the American Way for sending me an email to inform me of their campaign to reinstate Wendy Gonaver, an American-studies lecturer at California State University at Fullerton. Ms. Gonaver was fired the day before classes last semester. As The Chronicle of Higher Education reports it:

Dr. Alan E. Kazdin, current president of the American Psychological Association, in a new column in the APA Monitor, brags that APA lobbyists are a vertable "swat team" in support of government dollars for scientific research. Much of that money funds the work of psychologists "in support of homeland security after 9/11", "psychological research within the Department of Veterans Affairs and Department of Defense", and the "special relevance of psychological science on... counter-terrorism" research, among other items.

It is surely cosmic irony that places Dr. Kazdin's article in contrast to new revelations from the ACLU's Freedom of Information Act lawsuit against the U.S. government documenting "the role of psychologists in military interrogations."

WANTED

Associated Press has a story up on the ongoing hunt for Nazi war criminals. The Simon Wiesenthal Center releases periodic lists of top war criminals from the Nazi era still at large. Despite the Wiesenthal Center's one-sided apologetics for Israeli crimes against the Palestinians (all sides have engaged in atrocities), we should pay attention to their efforts to bring Nazi war criminals and their collaborators to justice, even decades after their hideous crimes took place. Such efforts should also make Bush and his cronies start sweating, for reasons I will make clear.

I started to write a comment to OPOL's excellent, impassioned diary, Darkness Falls. But the comment grew and grew until I knew I had to post it as a diary.

I've taken the present tense of OPOL's work and put it in its proper past tense, because the U.S. association with and operation of torture goes back decades. OPOL asks why the American people have not moved to stop their government from torturing. The question can be asked retrospectively. The problem remains a timid and bought-off press, and two political parties uninterested, at best, in tackling the issue, or complicit, at worst, in war crimes and their cover-up.

Originally posted at AlterNet

In a surprising turn of events, New York psychologist Steven Reisner won over 30% of the votes in the mail balloting for nominations for the presidency of the American Psychological Association (APA), as announced at the beginning of April. This represented more votes than any other candidate running.

Dr. Reisner, a psychoanalyst, is a Senior Faculty member and Supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, an Adjunct Professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and a consultant to the United Nations on stress and trauma. As a key leader of Psychologists for an Ethical Psychology, he is also a leading critic of APA's position on torture and interrogations.

Following a pivotal article by Jeff Stein at Congressional Quarterly a few weeks back, today's Washington Post published an important article today, "Detainees Allege Being Drugged, Questioned." The story, by Post staff writer Joby Warrick, notes U.S. denials in using drug injections for coercive purposes during interrogations.

Adel al-Nusairi, a Saudi national imprisoned for years at Guanatanmo, and now released without charges, has a different memory:

"I'd fall asleep" after the shot, Nusairi, a former Saudi policeman captured by U.S. forces in Afghanistan in 2002, recalled in an interview with his attorney at the military prison in Cuba, according to notes. After being roused, Nusairi eventually did talk, giving U.S. officials what he later described as a made-up confession to buy some peace.

"I was completely gone," he remembered. "I said, 'Let me go. I want to go to sleep. If it takes saying I'm a member of al-Qaeda, I will.'"

An interview in Esquire magazine of John Yoo, former Bush attorney for the White House's Office of Legal Counsel, and author of two controversial torture authorization memos, may give a hint of what kind of defense Yoo will be present if he decides (under threat of subpoena) to appear before John Conyer's House Judiciary Committee on May 9. Of course, he may decide (or be forced) to fight any appearance. But when career prosecutors start thinking War Crimes Act, and Yoo wakes up and discovers he's expendable, then he might feel differently.

This comes out in Yoo's interview (with the portion below reproduced from TPMMuckraker, bold emphasis added). Note that the time Yoo is talking about is after torture techniques were approved and apparently directed by Cheney, Rice, Rumsfeld, Ashcroft and others in Bush's National Security Council's Principals Committee. The approval came supposedly at the behest of the CIA, who were frustrated with the interrogation of Abu Zubayda, captured in Pakistan in March 2002. (But note, there was an even earlier approval by President Bush, in early February 2002, of which more below.)

No it's not Bush's current program, although in the end it may turn out to be. With all the latest revelations about Bush's torture program, and the danger, as pointed out by Glenn Greenwald, of falling into scapegoating mode on an underling like John Yoo, I am reprinting a diary of mine from last summer. I don't reprint diaries often; I think this is the second time in something over two years. But the historical information herein is necessary to give context to the latest news.

*    *    *    *

Operation Phoenix Reborn: New Yorker Expose on CIA "Black Sites"

Jane Mayer at the New Yorker has written a riveting piece on the recent history of the CIA recent torture program, The Black Sites: A rare look inside the C.I.A.’s secret interrogation program.

also posted at Docudharma

Buhdydharma, the intrepid web proprietor of Docudharma, has posted an article today asking if, after the revelations by ABC news that basically the entire top administration hierarchy has been implicated in the oversight and implementation of a secret torture program, right out of the White House, if after such a massive revelation Bush, Cheney, Rice, et al. "will they get away with it?"

The National Lawyers Guild has issued a press release calling for University of California at Berkeley's Boalt Hall law school to fire Professor John Yoo. The NLG calls for the rescission of the Military Commissions Act of 2006 provisions that allow immunity and the prosecution of Yoo as a war criminal. Meanwhile, yesterday, Judiciary Chairman John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.) threatened to subpoena John Yoo to testify about the memo at a May 6 hearing of the House Judiciary Committee.

The declassification and release of Yoo's memorandum to William Haynes, General Counsel of the Department of Defense, written in March 2003, has caused a firestorm in the press. Yoo's memo is the smoking gun for those looking for evidence of how the Bush Administration flouted basic human rights law, the UN Convention Against Torture, and the U.S. War Crimes Act to initiate a campaign of torture against detainees swept up in the aggressive U.S. military and covert campaigns that followed 9/11.

The tireless activists at Coalition for an Ethical Psychology (CEP) have answered the call of the American Psychological Association for contributions to a proposed ethics casebook, which would examine critical or contentious issues that could arise for psychologists working for the military or CIA in Bush's "war on terror".

Of course, psychologists shouldn't be working at sites such as Guantanamo or CIA "black site" prisons, where basic human rights are limited, and psychological methods of torture are routine. Taking the latter as a touchstone of basic ethical practice, the submissions of CEP point out the absurdity of mixing "ethics" with illegal detention and torture.

This story is NOT getting the attention it deserves.

Noah Shachtman, writing for the Danger Room over at Wired, reports:

A study, written for U.S. Special Operations Command, suggested "clandestinely recruiting or hiring prominent bloggers"....

This 2006 report for the Joint Special Operations University, "Blogs and Military Information Strategy," offers a third approach -- co-opting bloggers, or even putting them on the payroll. "Hiring a block of bloggers to verbally attack a specific person or promote a specific message may be worth considering," write the report's co-authors, James Kinniburgh and Dororthy Denning.

On this 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., there's been a lot of speechifying and article-writing. But I have seen precious little that recounts the campaign of the United States government to discredit and vilify Dr. King. The activities of the FBI's Cointelpro program were documented by the United States Senate in its Church Committee Report. The "likelihood" that King was shot by James Earl Ray "as a result of a conspiracy" was the conclusion of the House Select Committee on Assassinations in 1975. Unlike the JFK case, the HSCA documents on the MLK assassination remain classified to this day.

Yet we will hear nothing about these facts in today's mainstream news. It's unlikely that much will even be said at the liberal blogs. Yet, outside of the work of Dr. King himself, it's the most salient fact about this day of dark remembrance.

It's sad really that all we hear about our Commander-in-Chief, our Great Decider, is how he is a gasbag, an airhead, an empty suit. Sure, he was 100% wrong when he declared in 2003 that the Iraq invasion was a "mission accomplished." And then, last week, he declared the Maliki-led Iraqi campaign against rival Shia "a defining moment in the history of a free Iraq." -- OK, a lot of hot air again. No matter that, as one commenter put it:

As the smoke clears over new rubble in Iraq's second city, at the heart of Iraq's oil region, it's apparent that the big winner of the Six-Day War in Basra are the forces of rebel cleric Muqtada al-Sadr, whose Mahdi Army faced down the Iraqi armed forces not only in Basra, but in Baghdad, as well as in Kut, Amarah, Nasiriyah, and Diwaniya, capitals of four key southern provinces.

But then, the President is only human. And he demonstrated this at a brief off-the-record gathering with press, when the vaunted "most powerful man in the world" let out a deafening explosion of greenhouse gases from the most powerful posterior in the free world.

Right-wing reactionaries thought manna had fallen from heaven along with the Reverend Jeremiah Wright's denunciation of the crimes of America. That's because Rev. Wright is Democratic presidential candidate Senator Barak Obama's personal preacher. But while the demagogues falsely label Wright's sermons as racist and anti-white, his remarks express truths that resonate with the experience of black Americans and cannot be forever hidden.

Anyone can go and watch excerpts from Rev. Wright's sermons, edited for maximum incendiarism by arch-conservative, Fox Network Hyas muckamuck, Bill O'Reilly. Yet, all the editing tricks in the world cannot paint Wright's sermons racist. But then that's the cry raised when African-Americans say anything on the mark about the experience of racism in America, an experience that has made them sensitive to the crimes and injustices of this country perpetrated abroad, as well.

"Alternative procedures." "Valuable tools in the war on terror." "Specialized interrogation procedures." "Safe and lawful techniques." "Good policies."

George W. Bush has more euphemisms for torture than his creepy Veep, Cheney, has expletives on supply.

On Saturday, in his weekly radio address, President Bush announced his veto of the Congressional Intelligence bill, which included a ban on CIA use of certain "enhanced" interrogation methods, like waterboarding. Bush defended the use of the so-called "alternative procedures" practiced by the CIA, as necessary for field intelligence officers interrogating "hardened terrorists." The play upon the fear of Americans of terrorist attack in the aftermath of the horrific 9/11 events turns upon well-understood traumatic mechanisms in the human psyche.

I know this has been diaried before, but the statistics are so startling, diaries on this should be clogging the Recommended List, not endless candidate diatribes (even if I understand the need for some partisan ballyhoo). Besides, I wanted to say a bit more about INS jailings...

My blog entry on this is a few days late, but what does it matter for the 2.3 million Americans who languish in the prisons and jails of this country? They have plenty of time on their hands.

The Washington Post article last Thursday, New High In U.S. Prison Numbers, grabbed some headlines and commentary in the following days. But soon, all too soon, the revelations will grow stale, the stuff of old news, and the millions of prisoners placed safely not only behind bars, but out of sight and mind, can return to their quotidian lives of ongoing despair and impotent frustration. The Pew Report that generated the recent headlines is available here.