#bush adminstration

The American Psychological Association has announced that it will conduct an indepenedent review of its role in US torture during the Bush administration. James Risen reports for the New York Times:

The nation’s largest organization of psychologists will conduct an independent review into whether it colluded with or supported the government’s use of torture in the interrogation of prisoners during the Bush administration.  

The American Psychological Association said in a statement released late Wednesday that its board had named David H. Hoffman, a Chicago lawyer, to conduct the review.

For years, questions about the role of American psychologists and behavioral scientists in the development and implementation of the Bush-era interrogation program have been raised by human rights advocates as well as by critics within the psychological profession itself. Psychologists were involved in developing the enhanced interrogation techniques used on terrorism suspects by the Central Intelligence Agency. Later, a number of psychologists, in the military and in the intelligence community, were involved in carrying out and monitoring interrogations. 

In an interview, Mr. Hoffman, a former federal prosecutor and onetime inspector general of the city of Chicago, emphasized the independence of his investigation. “We will go wherever the evidence leads,” he said.

In 2006, I began my first online communications job at an organiztion called Physicians for Human Rights. PHR had recently published its groundbreaking report, Break Them Down: Systematic Use of Psychological Torture by US Forces, which was the first explanation of how psychological torture became part of the so called US war on terror. Though we would come to learn much more about the insidious and corrupt invovlement of psychologists in the US torture regime, it was already clear to PHR’s Campaign Against Torture team that US torture could not go on as it had if health professionals would abide by their professional ethics and abstain from participation in interrogations. In the spring of 2006, the American Medical Association and ˙American Psychiatric Association both adopted official policies against member participation in interrogations—but the American Psychological Association did not follow suit. Risen notes that

critics have cited the association’s 2002 decision to modify its ethics rules that in effect gave greater professional cover to psychologists who had been helping to monitor and oversee interrogations. 

The most important change was a new guideline that made it clear that if a psychologist faced a conflict between the A.P.A.’s ethics code and a lawful order, the psychologist could follow the law. Critics say this introduced the Nuremberg defense into American psychology — following orders was an acceptable reason to violate professional ethics. 

“It’s sad that the A.P.A., rather than protecting its members from engaging in interrogation activities, bent its rules to allow their participation in those interrogations,” [Stephen] Soldz said. 

Over the next four years PHR released a series of follow-up reports looking at the health consequences and legality of enhanced interrogation techniques; medical evidence confirming the first-hand accounts of alleged victims of torture by US personnel in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo Bay; specifics of unethical health professional involvement in establishing a legal rational for torture; and profoundly distrubing evidence that CIA medical personel performed illegal experimentation on prisoners in the agency’s attempte to justify the war crime of torture.

I left PHR in 2010 but remain immensely proud to have part of these efforts and to have met an inspiring cadre of health professionals who have advocated tirelessly to restore meaning to their fundamental ethical precept of first, do no harm.

Despite the mounting evidence from PHR and other revelations, reported by journalists, the APA was unable to disentangle itself from the US torture regime. Risen’s exposé in his new book, Pay Any Price: Greed, Power and Endless War, of some of the corruption that kept psychologists involved in torture, has triggered the long overdue investigaiton finally initiated by the APA. In Pay Any Price, Risen wrote about

the email archive of Scott Gerwehr, a behavioral researcher with ties to the C.I.A. and other agencies who died in 2008, to provide a glimpse at the network of psychologists, academic researchers, contractors and intelligence and Pentagon officials who formed the behavioral science infrastructure that grew up after the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks to support the Bush administration’s war on terror. 

Most notable, the emails reveal that after the Abu Ghraib scandal broke in 2004, the association was eager to get out in front of the controversy by developing new professional guidelines for psychologists involved in interrogations. The group created a committee to study the matter, and in 2005 issued a report that, in effect, enabled psychologists involved in the Bush interrogation program to continue. A number of psychologists and human rights advocates have been critical of the work of that committee, known as the PENS Task Force, ever since.

This past saturday evening I watched the new Errol Morris documentary,  "The Unknown Known" about former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld. 

The Bush Administration (2001-2008) is one of the darkest times in American history. Thanks in large part to Donald Rumsfeld, who was the principal architect behind the War in Iraq. In this film Morris mostly lets Rumsfeld do the talking. He uses over 20,000 memos Rumsfeld sent during his time as Secretary of Defense as a way to frame the interview.  Rumsfeld fondly nicknamed his memos, "snowflakes' which help portray the man's mindset and obsession with nomenclature.  They demonstrate Rumsfeld's view of himself not only at the past when they were sent but in the present. 

Rumsfeld argues that history will decide if the Iraq War was a mistake. Even though it's pretty clear from the fact that after ten years of fighting that the U.S. not only lost the war, but the point. It is estimated that anywhere from 150,000-500,000 Iraqis were killed from 2003-2009 (the deadliest years of the war). He doesn't take any responsibilities for his actions. Even when it is clear that he never had an exit strategy, or an idea of what victory would even look like in the country. He invaded a fairly stable country that had nothing to do with 9/11 or Al Qaeda and by taking out Saddam Hussein (admittedly a horrible dictator) he made Iraq fall to chaos and strengthen neighboring Iran. Not to mention create more enemies for the United States. 

As if his lack of remorse for the Iraq War wasn't bad enough he also treats the use of torture during the Bush Administration in the most cavalier way. The most obvious aspect to why is because of his own prejudice against Muslims. He doesn't see them as human. It's clear from the moment 9/11 happens and the U.S. decides to retaliate in Afghanistan. The Bush Doctrine purposefully went against the 1949 Geneva Code that stipulates how a Prisoner of War (POW) should be treated. Thus changing American foreign policy for the worse. It hurts our credibility. Because now during the war on terror Americans can capture Al Qaeda / Terrorist / Taliban combatants and instead of treating them humanly under the Geneva Code they can deny them rights since they changed the language so that they aren't seen as soldiers but enemy combatants. This sort of prejudice allowed for the inhumane treatment at Guantanamo Bay that eventually migrated to Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq. 

By the end of the movie it becomes clear how obsessed Rumsfeld was with words and how they could be used to define unspeakable actions and to convince the American people we were the ones wearing the white hats. The mere number of memos requesting for definitions for terminology he'd use as propaganda to sell the Iraq War to the American people, but also to defend it were more than the number of memos trying to end the war. 

Former King George the 2nd OLC Lawyer, Jack Goldsmith writes in the New York Times:

On March 10, 2004, at the end of a stressful day running the Justice Department’s Office of Legal Counsel, I received an urgent message from the deputy attorney general, James Comey. He wanted me to hurry to George Washington University Hospital, where Attorney General John Ashcroft was recovering from gallbladder surgery. The reason: the White House chief of staff, Andrew Card, and the president’s lawyer, Alberto Gonzales, were on their way to visit.

The two men planned to ask Ashcroft to overrule Comey’s earlier decision, based on my advice, that parts of a still-classified counterterrorism surveillance program were legally flawed and could not continue. I was astonished. I had already informed the White House that Ashcroft was disabled from acting as attorney general. Gonzales understood this, because the morning before he asked me whether the department could continue the program for 30 days until Ashcroft was well enough to decide for himself.

At the hospital, Gonzales asked a barely conscious Ashcroft to renew the program. Ashcroft responded that he shared Comey’s and my concerns and complained about the program’s excessive secrecy. “But my views don’t matter, because I am not the attorney general,” Ashcroft added. “There is the attorney general,” he said, pointing to Comey.