Boundary Problems

Interesting controversy at the American Psychological Association (APA) about whether its members should participate in interrogation of military detainees.

Before launching into a vigorous defense or condemnation of the APA's August 20, resolution or its latest statement (August 16, 2008), persons interested in the issue would do well to read the background correspondence.

If nothing else, it shows that principled and reasonable people can be of two minds, and it highlights complex relationships such as those between law and psychiatry, and those between a nation's code of law and international law.

But to me, it comes down to this: It is not within a healer's ethical practice to monitor or refine or seek to ameliorate or participate in or plan or advise on interrogation techniques. As soon as the question is posed, the boundary safeguarding ethical healing practice has begun to be breached.

Let's make it clearer. It's not the job of a surgeon to monitor or refine or seek to ameliorate or participate in or plan or advise on interrogation techniques. Now we can see a key hidden assumption at work. It is that there exists some surgical operation that would fall within ethical medical practice if used in interrogation.

Clearly there isn't. Nor is there some operation in clinical psychiatry or psychology that would fall within ethical medical practice if used in interrogation. The concepts "interrogation" and "ethical medical practice" are mutually exclusive.

APA would be correct, IMHO, to ban any form of collaboration with interrogation on the part of its members.

This isn't a question of patriotism. Anyone who's mixed up about that needs to drill down and enquire whether there's any line he or she would draw if told to defend the country. If not, you're a sucker for manipulation who's standing on a banana peel at the top of the slope to Holocaust.

And that, in a word, is my problem with George Bush's notion of patriotism. Out of his notion of patriotism flow the unitary presidency floating above the Constitution and our Code of Law; illegal domestic spying; privatized detention camps unbound by any meaningful oversight; personal, private mercenary armies deliberately written out of the reach of military and civilian law; and, of course, the politics of swiftboating, to say nothing of torture, black holes, and renditions.

It's all of a piece. If there are no boundaries, there are no boundaries. It's straight downhill from here.

Here's What Arrogance Looks Like

Here are attorneys for the VP and the President testifying before Congress on when the President can torture, and what kinds of torture he can engage in--you know, trivia like that.

Did you think that, in the USA, Congress had the constitutional right to hold the Executive Branch accountable to the laws of the land? Well, think again.

This is the Real John McCain

From ThinkProgress.org:

Maverick Fails The Test: McCain Votes Against Waterboarding Ban
Today, the Senate brought the Intelligence Authorization Bill to the floor, which contained a provision from Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA) establishing one interrogation standard across the government. The bill requires the intelligence community to abide by the same standards as articulated in the Army Field Manual and bans waterboarding.

Just hours ago, the Senate voted in favor of the bill, 51-45.

Earlier today, ThinkProgress noted that Sen. John McCain (R-AZ), a former prisoner of war, has spoken strongly in favor of implementing the Army Field Manual standard. When confronted today with the decision of whether to stick with his conscience or cave to the right wing, McCain chose to ditch his principles and instead vote to preserve waterboarding:

Mr. McCain, a former prisoner of war, has consistently voiced opposition to waterboarding and other methods that critics say is a form torture. But the Republicans, confident of a White House veto, did not mount the challenge. Mr. McCain voted “no” on Wednesday afternoon.

The New York Times Times notes that “the White House has long said Mr. Bush will veto the bill, saying it ‘would prevent the president from taking the lawful actions necessary to protect Americans from attack in wartime.’”

After Bush vetoes the bill, McCain will again be confronted with a vote to either stand with President Bush or stand against torture. He indicated with his vote today where he will come down on that issue.

John McCain: He was against waterboarding before he was for it.

So what this means is that McCain, himself tortured, is fine with our instituting torture, which he himself has said will result in the torture of American POWs.

Tell me, where exactly is the moral high ground here? Where is the principle on which the stalwart McCain supposedly stands

I'll tell you: He has one principle: The advancement of John Mccain. End of story.

"You Have Failed Us Miserably and We Won't Take it Anymore"

Address by Mayor Ross C. "Rocky" Anderson on October 27, 2007
By David Swanson
From AfterDowningStreet.org

Monday 29 October 2007

Salt Lake City, Utah -

Today, as we come together once again in this great city, we raise our voices in unison to say to President Bush, to Vice President Cheney, to other members of the Bush Administration (past and present), to a majority of Congress, including Utah's entire congressional delegation, and to much of the mainstream media: "You have failed us miserably and we won't take it any more."

"While we had every reason to expect far more of you, you have been pompous, greedy, cruel, and incompetent as you have led this great nation to a moral, military, and national security abyss."

"You have breached trust with the American people in the most egregious ways. You have utterly failed in the performance of your jobs. You have undermined our Constitution, permitted the violation of the most fundamental treaty obligations, and betrayed the rule of law."

"You have engaged in, or permitted, heinous human rights abuses of the sort never before countenanced in our nation's history as a matter of official policy. You have sent American men and women to kill and be killed on the basis of lies, on the basis of shifting justifications, without competent leadership, and without even a coherent plan for this monumental blunder."

"We are here to tell you: We won't take it any more!"

"You have acted in direct contravention of values that we, as Americans who love our country, hold dear. You have deceived us in the most cynical, outrageous ways. You have undermined, or allowed the undermining of, our constitutional system of checks and balances among the three presumed co-equal branches of government. You have helped lead our nation to the brink of fascism, of a dictatorship contemptuous of our nation's treaty obligations, federal statutory law, our Constitution, and the rule of law."

"Because of you, and because of your jingoistic false 'patriotism,' our world is far more dangerous, our nation is far more despised, and the threat of terrorism is far greater than ever before.

It has been absolutely astounding how you have committed the most horrendous acts, causing such needless tragedy in the lives of millions of people, yet you wear your so-called religion on your sleeves, asserting your God-is-on-my-side nonsense - when what you have done flies in the face of any religious or humanitarian tradition. Your hypocrisy is mind-boggling - and disgraceful. What part of "Thou shalt not kill" do you not understand? What part of the "Golden rule" do you not understand? What part of "be honest," "be responsible," and "be accountable" don't you understand? What part of "Blessed are the peacekeepers" do you not understand?

Because of you, hundreds of thousands of people have been killed, many thousands of people have suffered horrendous lifetime injuries, and millions have been run off from their homes. For the sake of our nation, for the sake of our children, and for the sake of our brothers and sisters around the world, we are morally compelled to say, as loudly as we can, 'We won't take it any more!' "

"As United States agents kidnap, disappear, and torture human beings around the world, you justify, you deceive, and you cover up. We find what you have done to men, women and children, and to the good name and reputation of the United States, so appalling, so unconscionable, and so outrageous as to compel us to call upon you to step aside and allow other men and women who are competent, true to our nation's values, and with high moral principles to stand in your places - for the good of our nation, for the good of our children, and for the good of our world."

In the case of the President and Vice President, this means impeachment and removal from office, without any further delay from a complacent, complicit Congress, the Democratic majority of which cares more about political gain in 2008 than it does about the vindication of our Constitution, the rule of law, and democratic accountability.

It means the election of people as President and Vice President who, unlike most of the presidential candidates from both major parties, have not aided and abetted in the perpetration of the illegal, tragic, devastating invasion and occupation of Iraq. And it means the election of people as President and Vice President who will commit to return our nation to the moral and strategic imperative of refraining from torturing human beings.

In the case of the majority of Congress, it means electing people who are diligent enough to learn the facts, including reading available National Intelligence Estimates, before voting to go to war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will jealously guard Congress's sole prerogative to declare war. It means electing to Congress men and women who will not submit like vapid lap dogs to presidential requests for blank checks to engage in so-called preemptive wars, for legislation permitting warrantless wiretapping of communications involving US citizens, and for dangerous, irresponsible, saber-rattling legislation like the recent Kyl-Lieberman amendment.

We must avoid the trap of focusing the blame solely upon President Bush and Vice-President Cheney. This is not just about a few people who have wronged our country - and the world. They were enabled by members of both parties in Congress, they were enabled by the pathetic mainstream news media, and, ultimately, they have been enabled by the American people - 40% of whom are so ill-informed they still think Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks - a people who know and care more about baseball statistics and which drunken starlets are wearing underwear than they know and care about the atrocities being committed every single day in our name by a government for which we need to take responsibility.

As loyal Americans, without regard to political partisanship - as veterans, as teachers, as religious leaders, as working men and women, as students, as professionals, as businesspeople, as public servants, as retirees, as people of all ages, races, ethnic origins, sexual orientations, and faiths - we are here to say to the Bush administration, to the majority of Congress, and to the mainstream media: "You have violated your solemn responsibilities. You have undermined our democracy, spat upon our Constitution, and engaged in outrageous, despicable acts. You have brought our nation to a point of immorality, inhumanity, and illegality of immense, tragic, unprecedented proportions."

"But we will live up to our responsibilities as citizens, as brothers and sisters of those who have suffered as a result of the imperial bullying of the United States government, and as moral actors who must take a stand: And we will, and must, mean it when we say 'We won't take it any more.'"

If we want principled, courageous elected officials, we need to be principled, courageous, and tenacious ourselves. History has demonstrated that our elected officials are not the leaders - the leadership has to come from us. If we don't insist, if we don't persist, then we are not living up to our responsibilities as citizens in a democracy - and our responsibilities as moral human beings. If we remain silent, we signal to Congress and the Bush administration - and to candidates running for office - and to the world - that we support the status quo.

Silence is complicity. Only by standing up for what's right and never letting down can we say we are doing our part.

Our government, on the basis of a campaign we now know was entirely fraudulent, attacked and militarily occupied a nation that posed no danger to the United States. Our government, acting in our name, has caused immense, unjustified death and destruction.

It all started five years ago, yet where have we, the American people, been? At this point, we are responsible. We get together once in a while at demonstrations and complain about Bush and Cheney, about Congress, and about the pathetic news media. We point fingers and yell a lot. Then most people politely go away until another demonstration a few months later.

How many people can honestly say they have spent as much time learning about and opposing the outrages of the Bush administration as they have spent watching sports or mindless television programs during the past five years? Escapist, time-sapping sports and insipid entertainment have indeed become the opiate of the masses.

Why is this country so sound asleep? Why do we abide what is happening to our nation, to our Constitution, to the cause of peace and international law and order? Why are we not doing all in our power to put an end to this madness?

We should be in the streets regularly and students should be raising hell on our campuses. We should be making it clear in every way possible that apologies or convoluted, disingenuous explanations just don't cut it when presidential candidates and so many others voted to authorize George Bush and his neo-con buddies to send American men and women to attack and occupy Iraq.

Let's awaken, and wake up the country by committing here and now to do all each of us can to take our nation back. Let them hear us across the country, as we ask others to join us: "We won't take it any more!"

I implore you: Draw a line. Figure out exactly where your own moral breaking point is. How much will you put up with before you say "No more" and mean it?

I have drawn my line as a matter of simple personal morality: I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has voted to fund the atrocities in Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who will not commit to remove all US troops, as soon as possible, from Iraq. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has supported legislation that takes us one step closer to attacking Iran. I cannot, and will not, support any candidate who has not fought to stop the kidnapping, disappearances, and torture being carried on in our name.

If we expect our nation's elected officials to take us seriously, let us send a powerful message they cannot misunderstand. Let them know we really do have our moral breaking point. Let them know we have drawn a bright line. Let them know they cannot take our support for granted - that, regardless of their party and regardless of other political considerations, they will not have our support if they cannot provide, and have not provided, principled leadership.

The people of this nation may have been far too quiet for five years, but let us pledge that we won't let it go on one more day - that we will do all we can to put an end to the illegalities, the moral degradation, and the disintegration of our nation's reputation in the world.

Let us be unified in drawing the line - in declaring that we do have a moral breaking point. Let us insist, together, in supporting our troops and in gratitude for the freedoms for which our veterans gave so much, that we bring our troops home from Iraq, that we return our government to a constitutional democracy, and that we commit to honoring the fundamental principles of human rights.

In defense of our country, in defense of our Constitution, in defense of our shared values as Americans - and as moral human beings - we declare today that we will fight in every way possible to stop the insanity, stop the continued military occupation of Iraq, and stop the moral depravity reflected by the kidnapping, disappearing, and torture of people around the world.

Torture, Mad Max, and the American Right

Andrew Sullivan writes:

If America does not stand against the torture of individuals seized without due process by an unchecked executive power, then American stands for nothing. In fact, if this standard had applied two centuries ago, America would not exist at all. . . . To destroy the constitution, the rule of law, and habeas corpus and to legalize torture in the false hope of saving lives is the action of those who do not understand freedom and who do not understand America. It is the action of cowards and slaves.

What part of "Live Free Or Die" do these people not understand?

Amen.

But.

It's not that these people—BushCo, the Right--"don't understand." It's that they operate in a different paradigm. They've left behind the WWII paradigm. That was then. Now it's not about the Constitution or the Bill of Rights. It’s about boythink, how one type of post-industrial male, brought up on TV and movies, defines American masculinity.

From the Twin Towers to torture, the symbolic reference for the Right has always been psycho-sexual. Unless the its response is understood in that context, it seems wildly contradictory. How can a “patriot” espouse warrantless wiretapping, unaccountable detention, a unitary presidency, and torture?

Try this. As I've said for years, 9-11 was a bogglingly huge symbolic genital excision. It wasn't just that America's great towering (global corporatist) phallus was excised. It was also that it was brought down by a bunch of what the Brits used so nicely to call "wogs." Both go to the heart of white male America's greatest and most sacred myths: the myth of the self-made man, the invincible cowboy/frontiersman, the ever-successful Indian fighter/slave holder/ conquistador native tamer. Only a female bin Ladin would have been worse.

So, lacking a wholer and more richly nuanced definition of masculinity, a Rightwing America grown or growing of age in a post-industrial economy and starved for a viable new myth of the American Male latched on to the only role model it can comprehend. No, not John Wayne.

For all his faults, Wayne was hero to an older and better generation. Wayne was the WWII role model. Once we let him go and step from the 20th to the 21st Century, the veil suddenly lifts.

The model for today's Rightwing man is Blackwater. For Iraq, for Bush, for Cheney, for the corporatist/fascist power structure now presuming to speak for us, it’s Max Rockatansky with a paw on his chest.

For this Rightwing generation, the model American male is Mad Max, not coincidentally the character for which homophobe antisemite Mel Gibson is best known, who does his thing in a post-nuclear war dystopia brought about by the global oil shortage. And ironically, he's not even American. He's the pseudo-nationalist for the pseudo-patriot.

The Rightwing vision – playing out now in Iraq and embodied by men like Alberto Gonzales, Rush Limbaugh, Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Donald Rumsfeld, George Bush, and Erik Prince--canonizes vengeful, brutal, unrestrained and unaccountable men. Men like Max, only in this case, men who actually don't remember a time when principle was an intrinsic part of the authentic male ideal, men who areincapable of the U-turn that (too late) allowed movie Max to reclaim his soul, men who, for the most part, have had other priorities than putting themselves under fire, men for whom money is the measure of self-worth.

As we see every day, such men view laws as helpful in their place but not applicable to them. They also see the Constitution as just a piece of paper. For them, principles and restraint are for "pussies." The Rightwing vocabulary and the supporting role of faithful, super-orthodox women and minority characters (Clarence Thomas, Colin Powell, Condoleezza Rice, Lynne Cheney, Mary Matalin, Ann Coulter) pretty much say all we need to know about how today’s Rightwing American Man sees himself in relation to the rest of the world.

So it follows as night follows day that men like Bush, Gonzales, Limbaugh, Cheney and the rest view the capacity to dish out torture as the mark of manhood. Not surprisingly, it's the inverse of an older principle that saw the capacity to withstand torture and never deign to sink to its level as the core of the authentic adult male.

Sullivan: "We Have War Criminals in the White House"

When Andrew Sullivan calls Bush a "war criminal," something significant has happened.

Sullivan is a conservative. Sullivan is highly educated, well informed, and adept at rubbing his brain cells together. Sullivan is well connected, and he is not generally given to hyperbole. He is one of a handful of people on the Right whom I respect. He has The Atlantic as just one of his platforms, and if he weren't also out, gay, and gaily married, he'd be really influential.

Sullivan concludes a short piece on today's New York Times revelations about yet another "hide, distort, and lie" Bush episode thus:

A couple of things need to be stressed, because I've learned the hard way that intelligent people simply refuse to absorb what is staring them in the face, when what is staring them in the face is so staggering:

Never in history had the United States authorized such tactics.

There is no doubt - no doubt at all - that these tactics are torture and subject to prosecution as war crimes. We know this because the law is very clear when you don't have war criminals like AEI's John Yoo rewriting it to give one man unchecked power. We know this because the very same techniques - hypothermia, long-time standing, beating - and even the very same term "enhanced interrogation techniques" - "verschaerfte Vernehmung" in the original German - were once prosecuted by American forces as war crimes. The perpetrators were the Gestapo. The penalty was death. You can verify the history here.

We have war criminals in the White House. What are we going to do about it?

A couple of suggestions.

One of most shameful, paralyzing dissemblings of late is the spin that only Democrats occupy Congress. They could do much more than they're doing, but the rest of the truth is that Republicans in Congress that protect, enable, and permit this President to remain in power.

It is time for Republicans who love the constitutional promise of America to step up to impeachment, to show statesmanlike leadership instead of craven capitulation to a rogue Republican junta.

It is similarly time for conservatives, moderates, liberals, and progressives to put relentless pressure on all our senators and representatives, Democrat and Republican, to impeach and remove both Bush and Cheney from office.

What have we to lose? If we fail, the blueprint that Naomi Klein has laid out for us in The Shock Doctrine may well be our fate. Yes, I'm serious. Too many sinister correspondences have accumulated between the people and ideas that plunged Chile's 160-year old stable democracy into a bloody coup d'etat and the people and ideas that rule us today for a responsible citizen to ignore them. It happened there and it can happen here. If we continue to be drowsy sheep, it will.

Here's what I see: There are the unitary president's boggling power grabs: He has put himself beyond the reach of ordinary law and given himself and his men extraordinary, unconstitutional powers. There are his extensive and largely secret domestic spying networks.

There are the administration's systematic attempts to privatize education, intelligence, warmaking, and Social Security. There is its successful de-funding of the federal treasury and its creation of a crippling $10 Trillion debt in order to enrich his fellow oil, construction, mercenary, and weapons princes.

There are his relentless attacks on what shreds of social safety nets remain.

There are his "privatization laboratories" in New Orleans and on the Gulf Coast and his demonstrated contempt for human life in the service of enabling the shocks that permit those privatization wealth transfers.

There is the unbelievable travesty of a voluntary war for profit--another privatization shock lab in which oil giants get Iraq's oil, Iraqs get impoverished, demoralized,and bought up, Bush and his buddies get even richer, and hundreds of thousands are killed, maimed, and/or displaced.

There is now also legal torture and indeterminate detention of US citizens on US soil without court oversight or, apparently, even court reach.

Unfathomably, with all the resources that have gone to das Heimat Sicherheit (the Nazi name for the Department of Homeland Security), every day comes another report that nothing, really, has been done to make us more secure. It's beginning to look a lot like a bait and switch deal to me.

Finally, just in case that hasn't gotten your attention; there's the ENDGAME. This from Residentcynic on Daily Kos:

ENDGAME is the policy executed by the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and its sub-agencies, the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) and the Office of Detention and Removal (DRO), that is part of a sweeping 10-year plan (2002-2012) to: 1) apprehend, 2) incarcerate (detain), 3) "process"—(investigate and question), and 4) remove all removable aliens or potential terrorists. The order of apprehension to removal is literal, as the Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) under DHS shifted the traditionally two-pronged approach of 1)investigation, 2)detention-removal to a one-pronged approach in 2000: detention-first and "process" the person while incarcerated. (p. 2-7 of ENDGAME document)

Bush already has $400 million to work with, and, with his crony Halliburton, is in process of creating 40,000 detention beds in this country, for "aliens and potential terrorists." What exactly is a "potential terrorist" when only The Decider gets to decide? If he doesn't lie the way the election turns out, what's to stop him from declaring martial law and using one of his mercenary armies to enforce it? Or maybe the bombing of Iran will be the shock that precipitates the fall of the United States at the hands of its own president.

Andrew, what do you make of this? The same "free market/privateers" and Neo-Cons who pulled off Chile and Argentina and Indonesia are either in our Administration or allied NGOs or think-tanks as we speak, or just were, or are its gurus (Kissinger, Strauss, Friedman) or disciples. I mean Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Cheney, Perle, Norquist, Moore, et al.) It looks very like they have everything they need to pull it off, and are devoted to the idea that they should.

Yes, "our refusal to absorb what is staring us in the face is staggering." But really, how many more bread crumbs do we need?

I'm doing my bit where I am. Call on your people to do theirs. Now.

[Inserted October 7: Received this update from Residentcynic, author of the important research on ENDGAME referenced above. This update is also available in the comments addressing this post:

"Just wanted to alert you to a couple of changes/corrections to the diary I posted at dKos.

"First, the 'potential terrorist' cite is actually on p. 2-11 of the document, and not in the Executive summary.

Second, I accidentally noted that KBR had a contract with DHS in 2000, 2004, and 2006. DHS was not an official agency until 2002, thus, the contract was between KBR and what was formerly the INS and now is ICE/DHS. Link can be found at:

Thanks for spreading the word, I really think this is important and should not be shrugged off."]