The Frost family v. BushCo:  a modern day David and Goliath story????

This is a story of a Republican movement totally detached from even trying to deceive us anymore. They are hateful.

I suggest reading the Baltimore Sun story first, and then read Kos’s great compilation of reactions.

[http://www.baltimore…]

[http://www.dailykos….]

No comments needed with this… story stands on its own

(Bumped – promoted by Armando)

This is an OPEN THREAD. Here are four stories in the news at 4 o’clock to get you started.

1. The following from Washington Post columnist, Dana Milbank, is offered without comment:

   House Speaker Nancy Pelosi was in a determinedly good mood when she sat down to lunch with reporters yesterday. She entered the room beaming and, over the course of an hour, smiled no fewer than 31 times and got off at least 23 laughs.

   But her spirits soured instantly when somebody asked about the anger of the Democratic “base” over her failure to end the war in Iraq.

   “Look,” she said, the chicken breast on her plate untouched. “I had, for five months, people sitting outside my home, going into my garden in San Francisco, angering neighbors, hanging their clothes from trees, building all kinds of things — Buddhas? I don’t know what they were — couches, sofas, chairs, permanent living facilities on my front sidewalk.”

   Unsmilingly, she continued: “If they were poor and they were sleeping on my sidewalk, they would be arrested for loitering, but because they have ‘Impeach Bush’ across their chest, it’s the First Amendment.”

   Though opposed to the war herself, Pelosi has for months been a target of an antiwar movement that believes she hasn’t done enough. Cindy Sheehan has announced a symbolic challenge to Pelosi in California’s 8th Congressional District. And the speaker is seething.

   “We have to make responsible decisions in the Congress that are not driven by the dissatisfaction of anybody who wants the war to end tomorrow,” Pelosi told the gathering at the Sofitel, arranged by the Christian Science Monitor. Though crediting activists for their “passion,” Pelosi called it “a waste of time” for them to target Democrats. “They are advocates,” she said. “We are leaders.”

2. If I were president decider, this is not the kind of headline I’d want to see in the Los Angeles Times — ‘Bush urges ‘no’ vote on Armenian genocide bill‘ or in The New York Times — ‘Bush Argues Against Armenian Genocide Measure‘. But then after invading countries, sanctioning and using torture, and systematically eroding away your own citizens’ civil liberties, then I suppose you might get a bit squeemish about the House passing a resolution recognizing, in yet another non-binding resolution, genocide.

   From George W. Bush’s statement today:

   On another issue before Congress, I urge members to oppose the Armenian genocide resolution now being considered by the House Foreign Affairs Committee. We all deeply regret the tragic suffering of the Armenian people that began in 1915. This resolution is not the right response to these historic mass killings, and its passage would do great harm to our relations with a key ally in NATO and in the global war on terror.

   So, Mr. Bush. What is the “right response”? According to the Washington Post story on Bush’s remarks, “Three former defense secretaries, in their own letter, said Turkey probably would cut off U.S. access to a critical air base. The government of Turkey is spending more than $300,000 a month on communications specialists and high-powered lobbyists… to defeat the initiative.” Bush has offered no alternative to the reslution other than continuing to ignore genocide.

   [EVENING UPDATE] According to Bloomberg, House panel backs Armenian measure over objections. “A congressional panel approved a resolution calling for the U.S. to designate the World War I-era killings of 1.5 million Armenians as genocide, amid warnings that the measure would harm relations with Turkey. ¶ The nonbinding resolution, backed by the House Foreign Affairs Committee on a 27-21 vote, calls for a reversal in the practice by successive presidential administrations of avoiding referring to the deaths as genocide in an annual April message commemorating the event. More than half of the House’s 435 members have signed on as co-sponsors.”

3. The Guardian reports that Russian president, Vladimir Putin said there is no proof Iran is trying to make nuclear weapons.

   “We do not have data that says Iran is trying to produce nuclear weapons. We do not have such objective data,” Mr Putin told a news conference in Moscow after talks with the French president, Nicolas Sarkozy.

   “Therefore we proceed from a position that Iran has no such plans, but we share the concern of our partners that all programmes should be as transparent as possible.”

   So, will Putin provide an effective check to President-in-waiting Cheney? Would Russian protection extend over Iran? Welcome to the Neo Cold War. Now with even more insanity!

News item no. 4, ‘Tensions heat up between China and Taiwan’ and today’s “Guns of Greed” is below the fold.

4. The New York Times reports tensions between China and Taiwan are heating up. “The blanket of China’s air defense radar now almost matches similar networks in developed countries, state media reported today, in an announcement that coincided with Taiwan’s first National Day military parade in 16 years.” China is rapidly modernizing its military and “this system is a direct challenge for self-governing Taiwan”.

   Taiwan is bidding for United Nations membership under its own name and, in a response to China, “has developed a long-range, land-attack cruise missile with sufficient range to strike targets as far away as Shanghai.” Taiwan is developing a new long-range missile and “up to 500 of the missiles could be deployed on mobile launchers on Taiwan and on the island’s warships.” The Bush administration opposes the Taiwanese missile program.

   Militarily, China has the advantage with “sophisticated surface-to-air missiles”. Also, the “Chinese Air Force now has hundreds of advanced Russian-designed fighters” and a new fighter developed in China “compares favorably with its current Western counterparts”. Taiwain has obsolete “American- and French-made strike aircraft”.

   China’s arms buildup could also pose challenges to the United States if it is drawn into a conflict with Beijing over Taiwan. The commander of American forces in Japan, Lt. Gen. Bruce Wright, told The Associated Press earlier this month that China’s air defenses were now almost impenetrable to the American F-15 and F-16 aircraft stationed in Asia.

   Only the stealthy F-22 or the Joint Strike Fighter still under development could carry out missions over China, he said. “Our planes are much older than the planes they would be matched against,” Mr. Wright said… “For the first time in history, we are seeing another nation, in this case China, with newer fighters than we have.”

   Oh boy.

5. Today’s “Guns of Greed” is brief, but looks at the funerals of the two women killed by private security contractors yesterday.

   • Reuters reports, Iraqi official said security guards fired randomly. “Baghdad security spokesman Brigadier-General Qassim Moussawi said the women were at an intersection in Baghdad’s Karrada district when four four-wheel-drive vehicles drove up in convoy. ‘It opened fire randomly, hitting an Oldsmobile vehicle being driven by a woman,’ Moussawi [said], adding that the shooting was under investigation.” The mercenaries involved are employees of the Australian-run, Dubai-based Unity Resources Group (URG).

   • The AP reports on the women’s funeral. “The funeral Mass for Marou Awanis and Geneva Jalal, [two Armenian Christian women] who died in Tuesday’s shooting, was held at the Virgin Mary Church. Awanis’ three daughters cried and other female relatives wailed over the caskets, adorned only with a golden cross.”

     The Rev. Kivork Arshlian urged the government to punish those responsible despite the immunity that has generally been enjoyed by foreign security contractors in Iraq. “This is a crime against humanity in general and against Iraqis in particular. Many other people were killed in a similar way,” he said. “We call upon the government to put an end to these killings.”

     He demanded that those responsible be held accountable in Iraq. “This security company should leave the country. Those who committed this crime should be punished because they claimed the lives of two people,” he said. “We do not want a trial in Australia, which we would know nothing about.”

     “What is the use of the word ‘sorry?'” screamed Nora Jalal, Awanis’ daughter and a student at Baghdad’s Technology University.

     Anahet Bougous, said Awanis, her the sister-in-law, was using her car as a taxi “to drive government employees to work to raise money for her three daughters after her husband died during heart surgery last year.” AFP has more from the women’s funeral. “‘The incident is a barbarous crime,’ said one sobbing relative, Kasbar Boghos. ‘Those guards are inhuman. They have no pity nor do they have any religion.’ Another, Kevork Armelian, judged the shootings a ‘crime against humanity.'”

     During the shooting, “another woman passenger was wounded in the shoulder” and “a child was injured by flying glass.”

So, what else is happening?

Note: Revisiting a topic originally posted over on The Big Orange. Given our current discussions about extraordinary rendition and torture, it seemed worth dusting off (actually this is a major rewrite) and posting in the new digs.

The seminal piece to date on the origins of extraordinary rendition is this piece over in the New Yorker. It is titled: Outsourcing Torture – The secret history of America’s “extraordinary rendition” program. (by Jane Mayer).

The main focus of the article is to discuss how egregiously the government of George W. Bush has crossed the line in its decisions to use extraordinary rendition as a tool to fight terrorism.

But my interest in the piece was tweaked by the discussions about the origins of the program. And with a little research, the picture proved not to be pretty.

Early in the New Yorker piece, we see the following:

Rendition was originally carried out on a limited basis, but after September 11th, when President Bush declared a global war on terrorism, the program expanded beyond recognition-becoming, according to a former C.I.A. official, “an abomination.”

Originally carried out by whom? Later in the article…

…But some people who have been fighting terrorism for many years are concerned about unintended consequences of the Administration’s radical legal measures. Among these critics is Michael Scheuer, a former C.I.A. counter-terrorism expert who helped establish the practice of rendition.

Turns out Mr. Scheuer helped establish the practice under the Clinton Administration, after the first World Trade Center bombing in 1993. Richard Clarke and company were concerned about how to ‘legally’ apprehend foreign terrorists, and ultimately the process of Extraordinary Rendition was born.

Some additional information:

Not long ago, Scheuer, who lives in northern Virginia, spoke openly for the first time about how he and several other top C.I.A. officials set up the program, in the mid-nineties. “It was begun in desperation, ” he told me. At the time, he was the head of the C.I.A.’s Islamic-militant unit, whose job was to “detect, disrupt, and dismantle” terrorist operations. His unit spent much of 1996 studying how Al Qaeda operated; by the next year, Scheuer said, its mission was to try to capture bin Laden and his associates. He recalled, “We went to the White House”-which was then occupied by the Clinton Administration-“and they said, ‘Do it.’ ” He added that Richard Clarke, who was in charge of counter-terrorism for the National Security Council, offered no advice. “He told me, ‘Figure it out by yourselves,’ ” Scheuer said. (Clarke did not respond to a request for comment.)

But Richard Clarke did discuss the origins of the program in his book Against All Enemies. The best link I could find was on wikipedia, and here is the passage of interest:

Snatches, or more properly “extraordinary renditions,” were operations to apprehend terrorists abroad, usually without the knowledge of and almost always without public acknowledgement of the host government …. The first time I proposed a snatch, in 1993, the White House Counsel, Lloyd Cutler, demanded a meeting with the President to explain how it violated international law. Clinton had seemed to be siding with Cutler until Al Gore belatedly joined the meeting, having just flown overnight from South Africa. Clinton recapped the arguments on both sides for Gore: Lloyd says this. Dick says that. Gore laughed and said, “That’s a no-brainer. Of course it’s a violation of international law, that’s why it’s a covert action. The guy is a terrorist. Go grab his ass.” (pp. 143-144)

The Clinton Administration began the Extraordinary Rendition program knowing full well those ‘snatched’ would be sent to Egypt – and tortured.

There is no other way to read the article. No sugar coating it. And Al Gore was likely a main player in the drama.

I’m sure when used by ‘our side’, they were more selective. I’m pretty sure anybody they ‘snatched’ was probably a bad guy.

But I’m also damn certain they never should have started it. Look where that road has taken us since.

It is vital to our long-term national interest to repudiate these programs for once and for all. They are an affront to our national character. As we have seen, even our methods from WWII were far more honorable.

I would hope Al Gore has learned his lesson here. I would support his entry into the race for President, but I would also expect him to apologize at the very least for his (apparent / likely) role in the Extraordinary Rendition program.

This error in our collective judgment must be addressed.

The New York Times had a front page article on the legal peregrinations of the Bush Administrations as it seeks safe harbor for its ship of torturers. The next day, the scandal spills out into official Washington, and the stubborn evil denizens at 1600 Pennsylvania trot out for a desultory press conference. There’s the snarling, contemptuous Bush, explaining, “This government does not torture people.”

Away, in countless rooms in millions of houses, the populace reads the stories and sighs and does nothing. Politicians screech, and pundits blather, and the war their generation shouldered with both protest and calm continued its carnage. Slowly, the news media formed a tight narrative around the new scandal: Bush’s Justice Department had found a way to legally, and yet secretly (and only in 2007 America can this occur without oxymoron), legitimate forms of torture too bestial to contemplate — beatings, simulated drownings, freezing men half to death… you know, Bush had growled, interrogation techniques that were “tough, safe, necessary and lawful.”

But no one knew, no one could know, that in the bowels of CIA headquarters at Langley, a group of men and women were safeguarding a group of techniques that were already exposed, and already forgotten, that were carefully cozened, that men were trained in, that were meant to outlast the worst New York Times editorial or Congressional investigation. And if they were referred to, if anyone should have to whisper them, they could use the awful acronym that had referenced them for over fifty years now: DDD.

There are those, interrogation professionals, who know only too well how imperfect and imprecise the more violent methods of third-world torturers are. The Egyptians may wish to hang men from their arms until their sockets burst out of their shoulders. The Syrians may wish to attach electric wires to generators and to men’s genitals, and crank up the current. The Uzbeks may want to drown men in boiling water, or rip their fingernails out. But the CIA knew such methods were not, well, scientific.

In 1956, in the pages of an obscure academic journal, Sociometry, I.E. Farber, Harry F. Harlow, and Louis Jolyon West published a classic work of the interrogation field, Brainwashing, Conditioning, and DDD (Debility, Dependency, and Dread). It was based on a report for the Study Group on Survival Training, paid for by the U.S. Air Force. The article states that “permission is granted for reproduction, translation, publication, use, and disposal in whole and in part by or for the United States government”.

Who Were the Men Who Developed It?

Harry Harlow

Harlow was a Stanford educated psychologist. His career, however, unfolded mostly at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. He became President of the Midwestern Psychological Association, and President of the Division of Experimental Psychology in the American Psychological Association (APA). In 1958, Harry Harlow was elected President of the APA itself.

But what Harlow was most famous for were his experiments on maternal deprivation and isolation, utilizing monkeys. His famous wire/cloth “mother” monkeys, nicknamed “iron maidens” by him, demonstrated the profound need for affection and attachment in all primates. In later years, he was demonized for by animal rights activists for his unethical experiments on animals.

The Wikipedia article on Harlow mentions the maternal-deprivation and isolation experiments on infant macaque monkeys, noting:

The monkeys were left alone for up to 24 months, and emerged severely disturbed….

The experiments were controversial, with some researchers citing them as factors in the rise of the animal liberation movement.

The standard biographical references fail to mention the DDD article.

I. E. Farber

Farber was a psychologist at the University of Iowa. He was researching the “Effects of Anxiety, Stress, and Task Variables on Reaction Time”, and had already co-authored, at the time of the DDD essay, an article in the Journal of Experimental Psychology, “Conditioned fear as revealed by magnitude of startle response to an auditory stimulus”.

Louis Jolyon “Jolly” West

Those of you who went to UCLA probably know the Louis Joylon West Auditorium at the Neuropsychiatric (or NPI) Building. West had been chairman of the UCLA Department of Psychiatry and Biobehavioral Sciences, and a controversial figure in his own right. Famously, he worked with Dr. Margaret Singer in a pre-trial examination of Patty Hearst. He also examined the imprisoned Jack Ruby, killer of Lee Harvey Oswald. Some of West’s causes stamp him as a liberal: he was against the death penalty. He supported the sit-in protesters of the civil rights movement, and travelled to South Africa to testify for prisoners of the apartheid regime there.

Dr. West also participated in a symposium for the Group for the Advancement of Psychiatry (GAP) in November 1956. It was titled “Methods of Forceful Indoctrination: Observations and Interviews”, and I’ve written on it before. “Jolly” West told his Asbury Park, New Jersey, psychiatric audience that DDD consisted of “constant attempts to induce anxiety and despair”.

The New York Times obituary of West, who died at 74 in 1999, describes this famous/infamous figure (emphases added):

…Dr. West was part of a panel appointed to find out why 36 of 59 United States airmen captured in Korea confessed or cooperated in charges of war crimes against the United States. What seemed to be a collapse of will led some to call the airmen cowards, and others raised the fear that the Communists had found drugs or mysterious methods to induce “brainwashing”….

“What we found enabled us to rule out drugs, hypnosis or other mysterious trickery,” he once said in an interview. “It was just one device used to confuse, bewilder and torment our men until they were ready to confess to anything. That device was prolonged, chronic loss of sleep.” That, combined with the constant fear of harm and the total dependency on their captors, led the airmen into startling and fairly long-lasting personality changes.

The Times article fails to mention Dr. West’s links to the shadowy MKULTRA program of the CIA. He was linked as a CIA researcher into LSD in John Marks’s The Search for the Manchurian Candidate, and in later documents the litigious Scientologists and others dug up, as West was active in anti-cult activities. But most importantly, as Chief Investigator of the Study Group on Survival Training, he co-authored the DDD article, which was to become the blueprint for a style of interrogation embraced by the CIA in its KUBARK Counterintelligence Interrogation manual circa 1963 (photocopies here).

Basics of Scientific, Psychological Torture

While today’s headlines scream about waterboarding and beatings, CIA and military researchers had concluded two generations ago that such torture produced unreliable results. In addition, they left marks. Questions could be asked. Dead bodies, the “failures” of coercive interrogation, would have to be disposed of. But what if there were a way to torture someone without leaving any physical sign of outward mishandling: no bruises, no broken bones, no burn marks?

According to Farber, Harlow and West’s analysis (hereafter referred to as BCD), the purported confessions of Air Force and Marine Corps airmen held by the Chinese communists during the Korean War, to the effect that the U.S. had used “germ warfare” as a military tactic, were to be explained by the abusive conditions of captivity and the stress these prisoners underwent. (Whether the confessions of the airmen were false or not is a matter of some controversy. Stephen Endicott and Edward Hagerman’s book, The United States and Biological Warfare, University of Indiana Press, 1999, makes a compelling case that they were not.)

BCD examined the various types of stress undergone by prisoners, and narrowed them down to “three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread”.

Debility was a condition caused by “semi-starvation, fatigue, and disease”. It induced “a sense of terrible weariness”.

Dependency on the captors for some relief from their agony was something “produced by the prolonged deprivation of many of the factors, such as sleep and food… [and] was made more poignant by occasional unpredictable brief respites.” The use of prolonged isolation of the prisoner, depriving an individual of expected social intercourse and stimulation, “markedly strengthened the dependency”.

Dread probably needs no explanation, but BCD described it as “chronic fear…. Fear of death, fear of pain, fear of nonrepatriation, fear of deformity of permanent disability…. even fear of one’s own inability to satisfy the demands of insatiable interrogators.”

The bulk of BCD explains the effects of DDD in terms of Pavlovian conditioning and the learning theories of American psychologist Edward Thorndike. They also found the “collapse of ego functions” to bear some resemblance to “postlobotomy syndrome”.

By disorganizing the perception of those experiential continuities constituting the self-concept and impoverishing the basis for judging self-consistency, DDD affects one’s habitual ways of looking at and dealing with oneself. [p. 275]

BCD is full of nuggets of useful information, the kind that can explain material that otherwise appears insane. Take the painful stress positioning of prisoners documented at Abu Ghraib and other U.S.-run detainee prisons. BCE explains: it’s all part of inducing dependency through expectation of relief, but in a diabolical way. Forced stress positions are a “self-inflicted punishment”, one which increases the expectancy of relief via “voluntary” means. But the latter is “delusory… since the captor may select any behavior he chooses as the condition for relieving a prisoner’s distress” [pp. 276-277].

This form of carrot and stick torture may not seem that sophisticated, but it is the use of basic nervous system functioning and human instinctual need that makes it “scientific” and effective. The need for sensory stimulation and social interaction, the need to eat, to sleep, to reduce fear, all of these are used to build dependencies upon the captor, using the fact that “the strengthening effects of rewards — in this instance the alleviation of an intensely unpleasant emotional state — are fundamentally automatic” [p. 278].

The CIA Perfects the Technique

This impairment of higher cognitive states, this disruption and disorganization of the very self of the prisoner, producing something like “a pathological organic state”, but one “perhaps rendering the prisoner susceptible to relatively simple conditioning techniques”, was subsequently modified and used by the CIA in its interrogations of countless individuals. If more brutal forms of torture sometimes were used, especially by over-eager foreign agents or governments, DDD remained the gold standard, the programmatic core of counterintelligence interrogation at the heart of the CIAs own intelligence manuals.

Chapter Nine of the CIA KUBARK manual, “Coercive Counterintelligence Interrogation of Resistant Sources”, describes coercive interrogation procedures as

designed not only to exploit the resistant source’s internal conflicts and induce him to wrestle with himself but also to bring a superior outside force to bear upon the subject’s resistance….

All coercive techniques are designed to induce regression.

The anonymous authors of KUBARK then quote the BCD article specifically:

Farber says that the response to coercion typically contains “… at least three important elements: debility, dependency, and dread.” Prisoners “… have reduced viability, are helplessly dependent on their captors for the satisfaction of their many basic needs, and experience the emotional and motivational reactions of intense fear and anxiety….

The subheads to the chapter are evocative of the DDD paradigm: “Deprivation of Sensory Stimuli”, “Threats and Fear”, “Debility”, “Pain”, “Heightened Suggestibility and Hypnosis”, and “Narcosis”.

CIA Reformers Thread the Needle

It may be worth noting here that modern apologists for the CIA, who appear in the guise of reformers, such as Steven Kleinman, a historian who wrote on World War II interrogation practice, and was a former Air Force intelligence officer himself, are big advocates for “rapport-building” interrogation. They despise the “bad cop” stuff, the violence that sends even professional interrogators over the edge, and makes the prisoner a bloody mess of dubious information.

Kleinman wrote an essay on KUBARK for last year’s “Educing Information” report for the Intelligence Science Board. In it, he makes, for a historian, a remarkable statement:

The KUBARK manual offers unique and exceptional insights into the complex challenges of educing information from a resistant source through noncoercive means. While it addresses the use of coercive methods, it also describes how those methods may prove ultimately counterproductive. Although criticized for its discussion of coercion, the KUBARK manual does not portray coercive methods as a necessary – or even viable – means of effectively educing information. [p. 133]

Not necessary? The CIA manual expends twenty percent of its exposition upon coercive interrogation techniques. Not viable? Here’s what the manual has to say about the “counterproductive” methods of torture:

Psychologists and others who write about physical or psychological duress frequently object that under sufficient pressure subjects usually yield but that their ability to recall and communicate information accurately is as impaired as the will to resist. This pragmatic objection has somewhat the same validity for a counterintelligence interrogation as for any other. But there is one significant difference. Confession is a necessary prelude to the CI interrogation of a hitherto unresponsive or concealing source.

In other words, torture is used to test the veracity of information otherwise obtained during the normal course of counterintelligence work. Its use to “educe information” is also not without its hard-grained efficacies. The CIA is very clear on this:

And the use of coercive techniques will rarely or never confuse an interrogatee so completely that he does not know whether his own confession is true or false. He does not need full mastery of all his powers of resistance and discrimination to know whether he is a spy or not. Only subjects who have reached a point where they are under delusions are likely to make false confessions that they believe….

The profound moral objection to applying duress past the point of irreversible psychological damage has been stated. Judging the validity of other ethical arguments about coercion exceeds the scope of this paper. What is fully clear, however, is that controlled coercive manipulation of an interrogatee may impair his ability to make fine distinctions but will not alter his ability to answer correctly such gross questions as “Are you a Soviet agent? What is your assignment now? Who is your present case officer?”

So much for Kleinman’s analysis. But what about other contemporary commentators, like Time Magazine‘s in-house ex-CIA man, Robert Baer? In a recent Time column, Baer rightly condemns Bush for his specious denial of governmental torture. He derides torture as uneffective, and a tool of political intimidation. But it’s what he doesn’t say that is important. By making waterboarding, slapping, and freezing of prisoners what torture is all about, the DDD paradigm of coercive interrogation is kept out of sight. This is was the same strategy used with great effectiveness in the reissuing last year of the Army Field Manual for interrogation.

This new AFM was lauded for banning the beating of prisoners, threatening them with dogs, sexual humiliation, performing mock executions, electrocution of prisoners, and waterboarding, among other noxious techniques. But in an appendix to the manual, the following procedures are authorized for certain prisoners: complete separation, sometimes with forced wearing of goggles and earmuffs, for up to 30 days (after which approval for more must be sought); limiting sleep to four hours a day, for 30 straight days; and other concurrent techniques, including “futility”, “incentive”, and “fear up harsh”. In the latter, fear within a detainee is significantly increased, through knowledge of the person’s phobias, if possible.

Why “Enhanced” Torture?

In the press, and in the speeches of politicians on both sides of the aisle, the new AFM was praised as a model of reform. The CIA was urged to embrace the AFM’s policies, but has demurred. Why, one wonders, as it’s evident the AFM has maintained a core DDD operational capacity (isolation, sleep and sensory deprivation, fear)?

One reason may be that when a prisoner doesn’t know what to expect, or in fact expects something truly awful, that increases the captive’s fear. Increased fear also enhances the negative effects of techniques like sensory deprivation. It is very likely that whatever is really done in dark CIA prisons, making it well-known that the CIA can waterboard you, or freeze you, or beat you is all about ratcheding up the Dread component of DDD. Similarly, indefinite detention has the effect of increasing the Dependency component of DDD: elimination of habeas corpus tells the prisoner “you have no escape”. The prisoner depends on the captor for his life, if not the existence (in its earthly form) of his very soul.

While I believe this explains the CIA’s stubborn adherence to “enhanced interrogation techniques”, but there may be other, convergent reasons. It’s difficult to know what goes on within the CIA, as its business is covert by definition, and misdirection, lying, and obfuscation are its tools in trade. Perhaps the CIA is holding out on its more atrocious forms of torture, waiting to pull an AFM-like manuever of its own, if it has to. It’s also possible that the CIA — a rogue governmental agency if there ever was one — simply doesn’t like to be told what to do.

But we citizens should not let induced ignorance become societal indifference. It is important that all elements of the U.S. torture program be exposed and made illegal. If the country can not rise morally to this, then a terrifying future lies before us.

Also posted at Invictus

(2 pm – promoted by ek hornbeck)

Bush pushes for telecom immunity
By JENNIFER LOVEN, Associated Press Writer
21 minutes ago

WASHINGTON – President Bush said Wednesday that he will not sign a new eavesdropping bill if it does not grant retroactive immunity to U.S. telecommunications companies that helped conduct electronic surveillance without court orders.

A proposed bill unveiled by Democrats on Tuesday does not include such a provision. Bush, appearing on the South Lawn as that measure was taken up in two House committees, said the measure is unacceptable for that and other reasons.

…

A top Democratic leader opened the door on Tuesday to allowing an immunity provision. But House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, D-Md., said the Bush administration must first detail what the companies did. About 40 pending lawsuits name telecommunications companies for alleged violations of wiretapping laws.

Bush detailed criteria that the bill must meet before he would sign it, including the immunity provision and the broad requirement that it “ensure that protections intended for the American people are not extended to terrorists overseas who are plotting to harm us.”

So could it be any plainer?

These treasonous incompetents who think it’s just hunky dory to disclose sources and methods to their pets in the sycophantic Beltway media (especially their house organ- Der Stürmer) are less interested in security than in trading away our liberty in return for covering their own asses and those of their corporate overlords.

And Steny Hoyer is quite willing to roll over and be butt fucked again.

These Beltway Bozos have to go.  All of them.  This is not what our Founders bled and died for, to lick the boots of an arrogant aristocracy of pundits, lobbyists, and sell outs.

Up against the wall motherfuckers.

Update- Here’s a link to a much better dK diary-

House Judiciary Rejects Telecom Immunity by FWIW

You read that right. When. Why am I so certain? I have of course no inside knowledge. None. Yet I’ve been certain that he would get in ever since I first saw An Inconvenient Truth, a year and a half ago. And my certainty has only grown since then. Am I delusional? Hardly. I just use a different primary premise for my opinion. Disclaimer: I am not an American. I can’t vote in your election, though I’ve followed your politics almost obsessively ever since watching the 2000 election debacle live on television (Canadians have a front-row seat when it comes to watching you). No, my friends. The timing of Gore’s entry is not so much to do with Hillary, ballot deadlines or any Hamlet-like hesitations on Gore’s part as it is about a meeting of world leaders on climate in Bali in December and all the meetings that will follow in the coming years and that will ultimately decide the fate of humanity on this planet.

Now first off, let me just address the doubters on this one. We’ve all heard your reasons and you’re entitled to them. Fair enough. To take an example, one frequent rebuttal now doing the rounds (for the umpteenth time) is that Gore “hasn’t the stomach” (dixit the doubters) for a run any more. Because he’s “fallen out of love with politics”. He said so himself. He’s even written a book to explain why the system is so “toxic”, so “broken”, so “sclerotic” (all his words, absolutely). But to “logically conclude” from his devastating critique of that “toxic process” that Gore has “decided to stay out” (he has made no such assertion) is basically to judge him as a coward. For if he is truely convinced the system is as broken as he claims, and with the level of righteous anger he expresses, given his particular skill set and depth of experience of that system, for him to decline to attempt to fix it would be akin to a top-flight neuro-surgeon diagnosing a deadly but still-operable brain tumor and telling the patient he won’t operate because he’s fallen out of love with surgery…

So let’s put that meme to rest right now, shall we? I think we can all agree that the proof is in. The man is a lion.

Anyone who can come out of the crucible of 2000 to face down the petro-denialists and singlehandedly put the arcane issue of global warming at the top of the international agenda is no shrinking violet. He’s a giant-slayer and a hero. Face it: Al Gore has finally come into his own, as a human being AND as a politician. If you haven’t heard him lately, he gives a barn-burner of a stump speech on Restoring Democracy, the Constitution and the Rule of Law in America.

But the main reason I’m so convinced he will run is the same reason he’s been barnstorming around the world for the past five years trying to alert the entire human race to the unprecedented danger it and we all face. Because he takes what he calls a planetary emergency very seriously, so seriously he has made it the single driving focus of his life, his raison d’être. It is that deathly serious, do or die, life-and-death issue that has liberated him to speak so much truth to Power and to speak out so forcefully not only on climate, but on Iraq, on the Patriot Act, on Warrantless Wiretapping, on the Unitary Executive, on the suspension of Habeas Corpus, on Torture, and on every other egregious power-grab by this administration, long before it was popular and long before any one else had the courage and vision to do so.

And it is the climate issue that will ultimately drive him into this race. The only question is when. And here I, personally, strongly believe the timing has everything to do with the UN conference in Bali in December, which Bush has been moving heaven and earth to pre-empt and sabotage and derail, and rounding up the usual suspects to enable him (among whom I am deeply ashamed to have to point the finger at my own country) though he may soon have one of his main accomplices .

The upcoming UN climate convention talks in Bali in December may get a last-minute shake-up with signs that Australia, an opponent of the Kyoto Protocol and key US climate ally, may well switch sides on the eve of the meeting.

Australia, the only other rich nation along with the US not to ratify the Kyoto Protocol, could soon see a change of government to the pro-Kyoto Labor Party. A national election is due and Prime Minister John Howard says he will have it by early December at the latest. Most political observers believe it will be in late November.

(…)

Such a move would further isolate the United States in its stance against firm caps on greenhouse gas emissions (…)

The stakes have been raised in the stand-off over international climate action in the past week with competing high-level meetings by the UN and the Bush Administration held within days of each other in New York and Washington. The meetings were billed by their respective hosts, UN Secretary-General Ban Ki-moon and US President George W Bush, as important precursors to the crucial Bali meeting. But they saw little progress as both sides stuck to their guns on the vexed question of which nations should commit to mandatory emission reduction targets.

(…)

It is unlikely, however, that an Australian switch to adopt the Kyoto Protocol would lead to a major shift in policy by the US at Bali to support firm caps on carbon emissions. (…)

Yes it is getting late, almost too late, but not for Gore to run for the presidency. To save humanity from itself.

For a long time now, top climate scientists have been “running around with their hair on fire”, to borrow a phrase from the 9/11 lexicon, even though the crisis we face is orders of magnitude greater than 10,000 9/11s. But now some of the most respected climate watchers are telling us that we may have already reached the tipping point and even the UN is warning that climate change disaster is upon us .

A record number of floods, droughts and storms around the world this year amount to a climate change “mega disaster”, the United Nation’s emergency relief coordinator, Sir John Holmes, has warned.

Sir John, a British diplomat who is also known as the UN’s under-secretary-general for humanitarian affairs, said dire predictions about the impact of global warming on humanity were already coming true.

“We are seeing the effects of climate change. Any year can be a freak but the pattern looks pretty clear to be honest. That’s why we’re trying … to say, of course you’ve got to deal with mitigation of emissions, but this is here and now, this is with us already,” he said.

And this is what is coming down the pipe, if nothing changes, thanks to the Bush Administration.

A climate-change summit is to be held in Bali in December, with the aim of agreeing the principles of a new international treaty to replace Kyoto, the accord that expires in 2012. But the talks face determined US opposition to mandatory emissions targets, and most climate negotiators doubt a real breakthrough can be achieved before the Bush government leaves office in 2009.

(…)

According to the UN’s Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change, which is leading research on the issue, global warming will disrupt and potentially devastate the lives of billions of people.

And, just as global warming starts to make itself felt, there are signs that “donor fatigue” has set in. Of about $338m (£166m) requested for Ocha’s 13 flash appeals this year, only $114m has so far come from donors.

Bali will be crucial, but what happens after Bali will determine the fate of our economies, our environment, our civilisation and maybe even our species, depending on how we respond and whether we do in time. That’s where bold, visionary, inspirational, intellectually brilliant and politically experienced, internationally respected and morally authoritative leadership will be essential. No other country bit the U.S. is in a comparable position to lead on this and no U.S. leader other than Gore possesses the required combination of qualifications and knowledge of the system to make the climate issue the “organizing principle” of the U.S. administration.

Let’s get our heads out of the sand. Unprecedented urgency, purpose and vision are what this planetary emergency demands. Nothing less. 

And thanks to his 30-year focus on global warming, his profound and long-standing grasp of the issue, his formidable web of relationships in the scientific community, his long experience of the political sphere, his astute, ground-breaking understanding of the media, and an overarching personal narrative that will embue his campaign with the Power of Myth, Gore is uniquely equipped to tackle the climate emergency, along with the many crises that have beset America since Bush took office.

As Jim Hansen put it perhaps better than anyone, in a review of An Inconvenient Truth in the New York Times:

The reader might assume that I have long been close to Gore, since I testified before his Senate committee in 1989 and participated in scientific “roundtable” discussions in his Senate office. In fact, Gore was displeased when I declined to provide him with images of increasing drought generated by a computer model of climate change. (I didn’t trust the model’s estimates of precipitation.) After Clinton and Gore were elected, I declined a suggestion from the White House to write a rebuttal to a New York Times Op-Ed article that played down global warming and criticized the Vice President. I did not hear from Gore for more than a decade, until January of this year, when he asked me to critically assess his slide show. When we met, he said that he “wanted to apologize,” but, without letting him explain what he was apologizing for, I said, “Your insight was better than mine.”

Indeed, Gore was prescient. For decades he has maintained that the Earth was teetering in the balance, even when doing so subjected him to ridicule from other politicians and cost him votes. By telling the story of climate change with striking clarity in both his book and movie, Al Gore may have done for global warming what Silent Spring did for pesticides. He will be attacked, but the public will have the information needed to distinguish our long-term well-being from short-term special interests.

An Inconvenient Truth is about Gore himself as well as global warming. It shows the man that I met in the 1980s at scientific roundtable discussions, passionate and knowledgeable, true to the message he has delivered for years. It makes one wonder whether the American public has not been deceived by the distorted images of him that have been presented by the press and television. Perhaps the country came close to having the leadership it needed to deal with a grave threat to the planet, but did not realize it.

And now, at this time most dire, the chance has come again, both for the American people and for the rest of us.

No. This isn’t about the Nobel or electability or stopping Hillary or anything else. This is about the future and the fate of the coming generations of human beings on this planet Will humankind continue to prosper and thrive and evolve for the better, or will future generations of our kin be living in a nightmare world of wars for water, massive movements of displaced people, starvation, disease and constant conflict for survival? 

This is about laying a marker, for the other Democartic candidates and the American public and all the world to see. And Gore will enter at precisely the moment when his entry will have the most impact, in terms of influencing what happens in Bali and beyond. Gore will be drawing a line in the sand, and not just on climate, but on Iraq, on the Consitution and habeas corpus, and torture and rendition and  warrantless wiretapping and restoring checks and balances and oversight and the Rule of Law, and the Geneva Conventions and America’s honour in the world. He will run because he must.

Cross-posted  at Daily Kos and Truth & Progress