Peace and Justice Post

UK Daily Mail | June 13, 2007
CHRIS ATKINS

Even George Orwell would be shocked. He described the sinister machinations of a totalitarian police state in his novel, 1984, and laid bare the danger of eroding our basic civil liberties, including the right to freedom of speech and the right to privacy.

Although he famously coined the phrase ‘Big Brother is watching you’, even Orwell cannot have foreseen just how prescient those words would prove to be.

Today, in Tony Blair’s Britain – which I naively voted into power ten years ago – we have witnessed a breath-taking erosion of civil liberties.

The truth is we are fast becoming an Orwellian state, our every movement watched, our behaviour monitored, and our freedoms curtailed.

Between May 1997 and August 2006, New Labour created 3,023 new criminal offences – taking in everything from a law against Polish potatoes (the Polish Potatoes Order 2004) to one which made the creation of a nuclear explosion in Britain officially illegal.

Then there has been the incredible number of CCTV cameras – a total of 4.2 million, more than in the rest of Europe put together.

And, yesterday, we learnt that the Government has agreed to let the EU have automatic access to databases of DNA (containing samples of people’s hair, sperm or fingernails) in order to help track down criminals, even though many thousands of those on record are totally innocent

How did all this happen? Who allowed it? To try to answer these questions, I have made a film, Talking Liberties, about the attack on our freedoms.

I uncovered a disturbing roll call of ancient basic rights which have been systematically destroyed in the self- serving climate of fear this government has perpetuated since the 9/11 attack.

First there was the Act which banned the age- old right of protest within half-a-mile of Parliament without special police authorisation.

And who can forget Walter Wolfgang, the pensioner who was dragged out of the Labour Party Conference for daring to heckle the Home Secretary? He was detained under the Terrorism Act 2000, which gives the police unprecedented stop and search powers.

In 2005 alone, this law was used to stop 35,000 people – none of whom was a terrorist.

But this is only the thin end of the wedge – our civil liberties, enshrined in British law since the Magna Carta, are being whittled away.

There has been an unprecedented shift of power away from the individual towards the state – but now this power is being used not to defeat terrorism, but to keep tabs on ordinary citizens. As well as a raft of repressive anti-terror legislation, there are the more insidious infringements of our freedom and privacy.

We will soon see the introduction of the vast National Identity Register, linking all databases such as the DNA database to which the EU will soon have access.

The tentacles of these networks will intertwine until they form a vast state surveillance mechanism, which can track every detail of your life: what books you borrowed from the library as a student, your sexual health, your DNA profile, your spending and your whereabouts at any given moment in time.

Ministers are even creating a children’s database, which will record truancy, diet, and medical history.

And, of course, ID cards will be issued in 2009 – to be used every time we carry out routine tasks such as visiting the dentist. Soon, biometric data – your iris scan, fingerprints and DNA, will help to identify you further.

And, all the time, there are those CCTV cameras – 20 per cent of the global total, even though Britain only has 0.2 per cent of the world’s population.

New Labour has an absolute obsession with these devices. Soon, more sophisticated cameras will be able to recognise your face and the information matched to one of the national databases.

All cars will eventually be fitted with a GPS chip, officially to simplify road tax payments but they will also allow government agencies to track every vehicle in the country.

There are, of course, more alarming implications to being constantly monitored – as Orwell understood. Soon, we will be living in an open-air prison.

Some may ask: why does all this matter? The answer is that to surrender our identity and privacy so comprehensively is to give up something we will never get back.

Although New Labour says its mania for data-gathering is all part of its plan to protect us, there’s no guarantee that future governments (who will be inheriting a nationwide surveillance machine and the National Identity Register) won’t use it to more malign ends.

Totalitarian regimes have, after all, always collected information on their citizens. Hitler pioneered the use of ID cards as a means of repression. The Belgians left Rwanda with a bloody legacy by implementing an ID card system which divided the population into Hutu and Tutsi.

When the 1994 genocide began, these cards proved a device for horrific ethnic cleansing, with one million people dying in 100 days. The Stasi secret police in Soviet East Germany kept millions of files in order to keep track of everyone in the country.

Of course these examples are the extremes – but basic liberties such as privacy and free speech have been hard-won over centuries and history shows that we should not allow them to be brushed aside.

This shift away from individual freedom towards state power has happened slowly, and almost without us noticing.

Like so many others, I was proud to put a cross against the box next to New Labour in 1997 as a first-time voter. But now I have become shocked at the vast swathe of new laws which had been introduced, most of them in response to terrorism.

We are told that this is all for the good – these laws, and the surveillance cameras and ID cards will stop terrorists. Is that the case? Sadly not.

The London bombers carried ID and were observed on CCTV – of course it did not stop them committing their terrible crime.

Intelligence experts say that most information leading to genuine breakthroughs come from informants, not through random tracking or surveillance of the general population.

In any case, liberty and security aren’t balanced on some delicate equilibrium, as John Reid, the Home Secretary, and Tony Blair would have us believe. History has shown us that it is precisely when you undermine people’s basic rights that they mobilise towards radical groups.

After all, one of the greatest recruiters for the IRA in Northern Ireland was the policy of internment, under which people were imprisoned without trial. Have we learnt nothing from our past?

Stop and search laws applied to Britain’s Muslim communities will simply polarise those groups. Instead, we need them to help us protect the country from terrorism.

It’s not all doom and gloom, of course – as I hope my film reflects. The sheer absurdity of the bewildering array of idiotic new laws has given us an abundance of bizarre and hilarious situations for our documentary.

But behind this dark comedy is something much more disturbing. Faced with the threat of terrorism, the Government has told us that we must lay down our freedoms for our lives.

Perhaps it has forgotten the millions of people from past generations who have laid down their lives for our freedom. I think we owe it to those people to turn this tide.

Source: Email: braina@nda.vsnl.net.in

By Badri Raina

After the shockingly questionable wiretap regime ordered, without Constitutional sanction it would seem, by President Bush, it is now the turn of young vigilantes. As reported by Guardian News Service, the Bruin Alumni Association has made the following offer to students at the University of California, Los Angeles: “Do you have a professor who just can’t stop talking about President Bush, about the war in Iraq, about the Republican party, or any other ideological issue that has nothing to do with the class subject matter? If you help. . . expose the professor, we’ll pay you for your work.”

For full notes, a tape recording and a copy of all teaching materials, students are being offered $100. Lecture notes without a tape recording net $50, and even non-attendance at class while providing copies of the teaching materials is worth $10.

The idea behind this 21st century version of McCarthyism is to discipline and punish teachers who express themselves negatively on the Bush Presidency and Republican recasting of American policy generally. Like their predecessors of the mid-twentieth century, these vigilantes must believe that the reds have landed, this time in the garb of the extenuators of ‘Islamic’ terrorism. How entirely voluntary their initiative is must remain a subject of suspicion.

Freedom-loving American citizens who have been either supportive or tolerant of the Bush regimes’ ostensible project of carrying the light of democracy to the dark corners of the world may need to consider whether America may not be paying a rather high price for the mission. Is it perhaps the case that in making democracy its chief export, stocks at home are depleting dangerously?

One legitimate inference from such a circumstance is that far from there being a clash of civilizations underway, the world may be witnessing a rather satanic convergence, as America inexorably takes on the colour and hue of what it assumes to be opposing. If yes, the proceedings might be seen to underscore the truth of the old adage “we become what we hate.”

It has been the argument of the Bush administration that the attack on the twin towers was a gratuitous act of barbarism (which it no doubt was), since nothing that America had done previously could have justified it. Thus, the “war on terror” came to be constructed as a righteous response to an evil act. The theoretical underpinning of that argument was supplied by the neocon think-tank who hold that the “Islamists” do not act out of any identifiable historical wrong but are impelled by the jihadi project to destroy the “western way of life.”
It seems about time that this informing political text is revisited — something that has repeatedly been suggested by adherents of the Enlightenment whose values are generally regarded to constitute the philosophical grounds of American republicanism. For example, the Bush administration is to this day unable to explain to its own citizens, let alone to the “international community” (meaning here the world that lies beyond the Anglo-Saxon persuasion), why it chose to attack an admittedly secular Iraq where no jihadis existed, and which had neither intended or done harm to America. Or, why within hours of the September 11 tragedy (whose perpetrators turned out to be American citizens of Saudi extraction) but one aircraft was allowed out of America, carrying the Bin Laden clan. To compound the ironies, it will need to be remembered that the Laden “Islamists” were at one time pressed into service as allies of freedom in Afghanistan, just as the Saddam regime was encouraged with full military support to launch an attack on Iran where a popular political change had taken place.

Such facts of history reinforce the suspicion that the administration lauds only such regimes in the rest of the world as are willing to buttress American interests, be they democratic, or autocratic, or “Islamist.” For example, here in India, it remains a question as to why democracy is not sought to be exported to Pakistan with quite the same vigor as to selective places in the Middle East. Or to Nepal, for that matter.

If these are indeed troubling posers, then freedom-loving Americans need to ponder without blinkers whether, after all, what is designated “Islamism” may not be a purely political phenomenon, unleashed to free West Asia chiefly from what is perceived as an imperialist axis between America and the Zionists. Exactly as the “crusade” that emanates from the Bush administration is not so much concerned with a defence of an evangelist Christendom, or the “western way of life” as it is with shoring up the ever-expanding greed of Corporate America.
Furthermore, it is obvious everyday that the doctrine of “full-spectrum dominance” spawns, world-wide, a contrary political yield. In Latin America, for example, country after country turns away from Classical Liberal democracy to one form or another of Socialism. Americans need to ponder whether the best principles of neighbourly accommodation, as enshrined in the Sermon on the Mount, may not, in the end, be better politics than the unchristian hubris of the Bush regime that seems guaranteed to land both America and the world into an Armageddon from which no victors may emerge.

9, Staff Residence
Kirori Mal College
Delhi- 110007
Ph: 766-6700

Because of their abuse and extreme overuse and over-extension of our military troops in Iraq, the Bush administration has been forced to rely more and more on private contractors to fill various roles in Iraq that were previously restricted to military personnel. These private contractors are being drawn into conflicts on a daily basis, essentially making them paid military mercenaries. They operate outside of US and Iraqi law, and they are being killed and wounded in a private war that has gone mostly unreported in the US press.

Today, the Washington Post reported that the number of contractors/mercenaries that have been killed and wounded has gone unreported.

They note that contractors have been “…taking hundreds of casualties that have been underreported and sometimes concealed, according to U.S. and Iraqi officials and company representatives.”

“The U.S. military has never released complete statistics on contractor casualties or the number of attacks on privately guarded convoys. The military deleted casualty figures from reports…”…the military wanted to hide information showing that private guards were fighting and dying in large numbers because it would be perceived as bad news.”

On one list alone that included only a small portion of the total contractor force, 132 security contractors and truck drivers had been killed, and 416 had been wounded since the Fall of 2004.

One particularly terrible incident was described in the Washington Post article this way: “On May 8, 2005, after dropping off a load that included T-shirts, plastic whistles and 250,000 rounds of ammunition for Iraqi police, one of Holly’s convoys was attacked. Of 20 security contractors and truck drivers, 13 were killed or listed as missing; five of the seven survivors were wounded. Insurgents booby-trapped four of the bodies. To eliminate the threat, a military recovery team fired a tank round into a pile of [US] corpses, according to an after-action report.”

These shifts in US policy mean that the United States is privatizing its military on a massive scale. Among the troubling aspects of this trend is that private contractors operate outside military law, and outside of Iraqi law, and are not accountable to anyone except for their employers. Further, deploying as many as 100,000 contractors in Iraq is costing US taxpayers up to 10 times more than it would cost to deploy the same number of military troops. Finally, there is the fact that both contractors and Iraqis are being killed in large numbers beyond the sight of the press and the American people.

This trend will only continue under Bush, because of the massive corporate profits being realized by “security” and “supply” companies, and in fact this may be the blueprint for the Bush/Cheney remaking of the entire US military into a substantially privatized “for profit” military force. The US is building dozens of permanent military bases in Iraq, and is planning up to two dozen more spread across Africa “to fight global terrorism”. Obviously, Bush and Cheney want a vastly expanded military presence throughout the world, and it will be a presence of a highly privatized nature.

Write your Senators and Representative, and tell them that you not only want the war in Iraq ended now, but that you want our military to return to a defensive military posture, one that does not include private contractors. Privatizing military functions can even put military troops in greater danger, because profit motives can outweigh safety procedures. If these companies were not making huge profits, they would never even consider sending their employees into harms way. But money talks… no, it screams bloody murder.

Dr. John Moffett is an active research neuroscientist in the Washington, DC area, who has published articles on the nervous and immune systems. Dr. Moffett is also the author and webmaster of the political opinion website http://www.Factinista.org.

Source: GEORGE BARNSBY DAILY BLOG NO.160 MONDAY 21ST JUNE 2007

http://www.gbpeopleslibrary.co.uk

ARREST BLAIR, WAR CRIMINAL, SERIAL KILLER AND VANDAL NOW.
Simon Jenkins in the Guardian 8 June has been the first to record that British and American collusion in the pillaging of Iraq’s heritage is a scandal that will outlive the illegal and racist war. Under Saddam you were likely to be arrested and shot if you stole an antiquity. Under the US and Britain you are liable to be shot if you don’t steal one. Iraq is the site of some of the irreplaceable Wonders of the World. For instance Ur is reputedly the oldest city on earth, but the great zigguratt is pock marked with shrapnel and its national Museum in Baghdad has been looted not only by permission of the American but with their active participation.

Blair’s crimes are those of war criminal, serial killer and cultural vandal and it is no longer fanciful to point the example of the Nazi war criminals in 1945. They were charged at a newly invented War Crimes Tribunal in the heart of a ruined Germany at Nurenberg in a specially built prison and court premises with mass murder and crimes against humanity.

Blair’s trial will take place under different circumstances. For instance he might be Impeached, as recently suggested by General Michael Rose. This has not been done since Cromwellian times and might remind us of the time when Englishmen led the world by cutting off the head of a king and existing for some years as a Republic. At the moment Parliament is too craven for Impeachment to succeed, but times change fast and this could be Blair’s fate.

Other ways are possible in our more sophisticated world. For instance Blair might be tried at the Court that he himself set up in 2000, namely the Court of Human Rights. This would be poetic justice. Another possibility is the European Court of Human Rights at Strasbourg in France. Finally Blair could be arraigned before the International Criminal Court dealing with the most serious crimes such as genocide, crimes against humanity and war crimes.

But it is not only Blair that we are concerned with but those who have aided and abetted him. Chief of these is Gordon Brown who seems not only eager to pick up the bloody mantle of Blair but to add war crimes of his own. Then there is the Attorney General, Lord Goldsmith who not only criminally declared the war in Iraq legal and thus gave Blair his excuse to support the war, but has supported Blair in every other illegal act that Blair has performed.
Next we should mention several of those currently competing for the post of Deputy Leader of the Labour Party, a post Brown, assuming that he becomes Prime Minister, could abolish with a snap of his fingers. I am thinking particularly of Peter Hain, Harriet Harman, Alan Johnson and even Hilary Benn if he doesn’t back track soon, all of whom have been ministers in the Blair government and thus a party to his crimes. Also Hazel Blears so devoted to Tony Blair that it seems she is willing to go down with the sinking ship. To those can be added Labour MPs who continue to support the war in Iraq. Also civil servants and Heads of Departments often guilty of giving wrong advice and bludgeoning Ministers into decisions they would not have taken on their own. When Blair stands trial, there will be many who share his guilt.

I would mention only one other category of people. That is journalists and newscaster who today have unprecedented power and are virtually the sole means of our being given truthful news. I pick out Jeremy Paxman, Andrew Marr, Jon Snow, Kirsty Wark and Martha Kierney, all members of the ruling class through their education at public schools and Oxbridge who have protected Blair by never challenging him on the war in Iraq and in their arrogance and conceit have for 37 times ignored the urging of a plebeian like myself to explain their actions.

PATRIOTISM AND LOCAL HISTORY .
British Day, I am told has just come and gone . I have expressed myself before on this question but it bears repeating. I see no reason at all to be proud of a gynaecological accident which saw me dropped on a slice of land called England where the people are much the same as those elsewhere, some good, some not so good and others so awful I wouldn’t touch them with a barge pole let alone a flag pole. Of those who want to wrap the Union Jack around themselves and me I recall the words, ‘Patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’. often attributed to Winston Churchill, but actually said by another great patriotic Englishman Dr.Samuel Johnson, whose biographer, James Boswell, amends this to read, not the last, ‘but the first’ refuge of a scoundrel.

In my search for a definition of my Englishness I recall the famous statement, ‘I am a citizen of the world my aim is to do good’. This occurs in various forms including Baden Powel, but I prefer the version of Pablo Casels, ‘Love of one’s country is a splendid thing, but why should love stop at the borders’.

My next exemplar in the search for my Englishness is that great patriot, and scourge of all hypocrites and humbugs, W.S.Gilbert. You may remember that in the comic opera HMS Pinafore, Gilbert had a character with a choice of nationality. ‘He might have been a Roosian, A Frenchman or a Proosian, or perhaps I’tal-ien’. However after mature reflection, ‘In spite of all temptations to belong to other nations he remained an Hinglishman, he rem-aaaaained an Hinglishman’. And if that is good enough for Gilbert and Sullivan it is good enough for me. I am an HINGLISHMAN.

But my best definition was that of Karl Marx, ‘Workers of the World Unite, You have nothing to lose but your Chains’. This was certainly true of me when in 1939 I was conscripted to fight for ‘my country’ and possessed nothing but two suits and a bicycle. Clearly some people had much more of this country than I had and some were enlisting me to fight against my fellow working men in a war waged, like the 1st World War to re-divide the world among capitalists.

Whether Marx’s definition remains true I am still not quite sure, but I know that Gordon Brown, who wants to burden me with a British identity that I don’t want and even Tristram Hunt a true English born aristocrat who writes eruditely on this question cannot separate my Englishness of what I am from the Britishness that I don’t want to be saddled with.

In the meantime, I have lived a long life, been round the world and have been not only a history teacher who teaches history from a text book written and researched by some one else, but a historian who has researched history for himself. And many strange thin g s have I discovered.

For instance, I was brought up in the town the Romans built on the banks of the Thames and called Londinium. Except that the Romans didn’t build it. Few of the invading army were Romans, most being Celtic tribesman from Western or Eastern Europe who had been trained to do the skilled work while the unskilled work was done by ‘ancient Britons’ of many tribes.

The same is true of Roman roads built throughout Britain. But particular to my studies, the Roman road which branched off from Watling Street and went through Wolverhampton which I was the first to excavate with a party of school children from Etheridge Secondary Modern School along the line of the road at Barnhurst Farm. This was built by labourers whose descendents were to become Mercians and who were probably too few to be able to resist the alien invaders of their land.

This Mercian ‘nationality’ has recently been in the news from revived interest in the Battle of Tettenhall fought either in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and where possibly in Henwood Road where I live Anglo-Saxon tribesman charged down the steep slope to defeat the Viking invaders who fled to their ships moored on Smestow Brook and thence down the Severn and back to Scandinavia with their ill-gotten loot. To excavate in Tettenhall or Wednesfield and turn up remains of tribesman or their weapons is the exciting prospect for children and adults in this neck of the woods. History does mean something to us here.

Finally I want to deal with another feature of local history. Just before Wolverhampton’s millennial year in 1985 which is dated to the time of the discovery of the first written document of the charter to Wulfruna of the ‘gift’ of Wolverhampton, I discovered that Lady Wulfruna was not the gracious benefactress beloved of all, but the Mrs.Thatcher of her age who received a gift she was not entitled to accept from a person who was not entitled to give it, namely the King of Wessex, of what was virtually the whole of Wolverhampton.

Inspired by my fellow midlander, Williiam Shakespeare who was disparagingly said to know little Latin and even less Greek, but became one of the world’s enduring history writers, I who had no Greek or Latin or even Anglo-Saxon was inspired to research what was, and remains the only history of Wolverhampton adopting a Marxist outlook of class struggle. The booklet ‘The Origins of Wolverhampton to 85 0 AD’ was published by Wolverhampton Borough Council to celebrate the town’s millennium. The booklet argued that although the Charter of King Ethelred to Wulfrun in 985 was the first written document of the town’s history, it was the final act of assigning land to private persons land which had formerly been the property of the whole community. So from the time the Romans landed bringing with them a class society we have had ever since, in Anglo-Saxon times an unholy alliance of Church and State whereby the state punished all those who wished to return to a classless society and the Church threatened everlasting damnation to those who refused to accept the new religion.

So history is made by the common people and should be written by them, not as an academic exercise, but to illuminate the history of the Multicultural world which is emerging in the 21st century.

Source: redpepper.org

Robtel Neajai Pailey
June 2007

Slavery isn’t dead, writes Robtel Neajai Pailey. Its modern-day variant is just found on a different kind of plantation

Emmanuel B is 30, a slender five foot three, and a labourer whose piercing brown eyes tell unspeakable truths. He’s not the kind of slave-labourer we’re familiar with from 19th-century plantations in the Deep South of the United States. Instead, Emmanuel is a modern-day plantation labourer in 21st-century, post-conflict Liberia, and the Firestone Tire and Rubber Company is his unyielding master. Like many workers on Firestone’s largest rubber plantation, Emmanuel was born in Harbel, has lived in Harbel all his life, and will most likely waste away in Harbel.

As westerners drive around in their heavy-duty SUVs, propelled along on the black gold of Firestone tires, Emmanuel wakes up at the crack of dawn to tap raw latex from 800 rubber trees daily. His clothes are tattered and his shoulders covered in red puss-infected blisters from carrying buckets full of raw latex suspended from an iron pole to the Firestone processing plant two miles from his tapping site.

Emmanuel was gracious enough to demonstrate what a tapper does from sun-up to midmorning. With a pitchfork suspended in the air, he extended his long wiry arms to ease the raw latex out of the trees and into the small red cups that catch it. The drip-drip-drip of the whitecoated liquid was almost as laborious to witness as Emmanuel’s daily task – another 799 trees still to go after this one. For Emmanuel and his fellow tappers, a 5am start is the only means of meeting their daily quotas; their wages are reduced by half if they fail to do so. Some have begun to use their children to complete the Herculean task.

I visited the Firestone rubber plantation for the first time in December 2006 while on a research fact-finding mission. I decided to take a break from high browed academic work, and visit the sprawling modern day encampment I had heard so many horror stories about. It’s what I imagined the South to look like during the century or so of chattel slavery in the United States, with the hustle bustle activity of plantation life and the accompanying strokes of exploitation.

As my brother-in-law, Christopher Pabai, and I pulled into the one million acre – and constantly expanding – plantation, we were welcomed by an ungodly stench, a stench I can only compare to the smell of rotten cheese. Not just ordinary rotten cheese, but the kind that has been drenched in burning oil, steamrolled on a conveyor belt, and neatly packaged for nonhuman consumption. That’s what raw latex smells like when it’s being processed.

Rather than wearing masks to protect their noses from the assault, the plantation workers ingest the foul stench day in and day out. It took all my willpower not to retch all over Firestone’s perfectly manicured lawn or lush green golf course that senior management frequents while on hiatus from their back-breaking overseeing.

But the foul stench is the least of the workers’ worries.

While England celebrates its 200th anniversary of the abolition of the slave trade, plantation workers in Liberia are trapped in a time warp of monumental proportions. They exist in the parallel universe of multinational corporate checkmate, where the prize goes to the highest exploiter. Firestone has been playing the chess pieces of Liberia’s rubber pawns since the company signed a concession agreement with the Liberian government in 1926 to lease one million acres of land for six cents per acre – an abominable exchange given the astronomical dividends garnered from rubber sales then and now.

In 2005, Liberia’s transitional government signed another concession agreement for an extra 37 years of rubber slavery. Rubber is Liberia’s largest export, and Firestone its largest international corporate exploiter, I mean employer, to date. The country and its people have paid a high price for the asymmetrical relationship.

History challenges us to stay on a forward moving dialectic of change. The Firestone example shows us that an ironic distortion of that dialectic is taking place right under our noses. Slavery isn’t dead, it’s manufactured in the rubber we use daily. We owe it to Emmanuel and his comrades on the Firestone Rubber Plantation to change the course of history, to make a clean break from modernday slavery and its peculiar 21stcentury manifestations. We owe it to ourselves.

For more information on the struggle against Firestone, visit the Stop Firestone Campaign website at www.stopfirestone.org. Liberian native Robtel Neajai Pailey is a graduate student at the University of Oxford and a multi-media producer for Fahamu/ Pambazuka News (www.pambazuka.org), which has published a longer version of this article

Source: Opednews

June 11, 2007

By Stephen Soldz

Late last week the Council of Europe released a report on the CIA’s secret prisons in Eastern Europe. The report concluded that, contrary to those government’s claims, that prisons existed in both Poland and Romania. Perhaps most importantly for opponents of torture, the report gives a detailed account inside one of these torture facilities. In this description we can see the results of decades of CIA study, aided by many psychologists and psychiatrists, of how to destroy human beings, the fruits of its MKULTRA program and the detailed implementation of the in the KUBARK and other torture manuals.

One of the problems the CIA faced in conducting their research on soul-destruction was the lack of available research subjects who could be subject to the full panoply of techniques or what they called “terminal experiments.” It is thus likely that the CIA’s psychologists, like Scott Shumate (who, according to his biographical statement “has been with several of the key apprehended terrorists”), were not involved solely in the construction of this hell, but also in studying its effects so as to better refine the techniques.

Since most will not read the entire report, I have extracted key Sections from the Report on life inside these American Torture Centers. Now, for a vision of life in hell:

ii. Reconstructing the conditions in a CIA secret detention cell

38. We must try to visualise the ordeal of secret detention in order to be able to appreciate fully the physical and psychological plight of its victims. For this purpose, I am attempting in this section to reconstruct as many aspects as possible of the conditions in a CIA secret detention cell.

239. A reconstruction of this nature is the first step towards regaining respect for fundamental human rights, because it forces us to ask ourselves the question: “what if the tables were turned?” This is the root of the Geneva Conventions and the military’s traditional reluctance to mistreat prisoners of war.

240. In this context, the policy debate in the United States around detainee treatment has given rise to interesting contributions, many of which rightly assert that “issues of detainee treatment raise profound questions of American values”.212 In the US political sphere, the McCain Amendment213 to he Detainee Treatment Act seems to offer us a threshold for the specific acts that we should and should not allow with regard to the detention, transfer and interrogation of foreign captives. This threshold can be summarised as follows: If even one single American captive were to be held under these conditions or treated in this manner, and the American population would find it abhorrent or unacceptable, then America should not be practising the acts in question against detainees whom it holds from other countries

241. The fact of being detained outside any judicial or ICRC control in an unknown location is already a form of torture, as Louise Arbour, UN High Commissioner for Human Rights has said. All the member states of the Council of Europe have a duty not to tolerate such treatment either on their territory or elsewhere.

242. In the following paragraphs I seek to convey the most intimate, always undeniably human experiences of being held and interrogated in such conditions. I have grouped these conditions under the following five thematic headings: confinement, isolation and insufficient provision; careful physical
conditioning of detainee and cell; permanent surveillance; mondane routine becomes unforgettable memories; and exertion of physical and psychological stress.

243. The descriptive testimonies on which the text is based have been kept strictly anonymous – largely upon the request of those who provided them – in order to protect the sources from which they emanate. These sources are mostly former or current detainees, human rights advocates, or people who have worked in the establishment or operations of CIA secret prisons.

244. The persons who endured these ordeals have also been granted anonymity. The following conditions and characteristics applied to several persons in every case, not specifically to any one individual.

iii. Confinement, isolation and insufficient provision

245. Detainees were taken to their cells by strong people who wore black outfits, masks that covered their whole faces, and dark visors over their eyes. Clothes were cut up and torn off; many detainees were then kept naked for several weeks.

246. Detainees were only a bucket to urinate into, a bowl from which to eat breakfast and dinner (delivered at intervals, in silence) and a blanket.

247. Detainees went through months of solitary confinement and extreme sensory deprivation in cramped cells, shackled and handcuffed at all times.

248. Detainees were given old, black blankets that were too small to lie upon at the same time as attempting to cover oneself.

249. Detainees received unfamiliar food, like canned beef and rice, many only ate in order to give some warmth against cruel cold weather.

250. Food was raw, tasteless and was often tipped out carelessly on a shallow dish so part of it would waste. Apart from a thin foam mattress to lie on or rest against, many cells had a bare floor and blank walls.

251. At one point in 2004, eight persons were being kept together in one CIA facility in Europe, but were administered according to a strict regime of isolation. Contact between them through sight or sound was forbidden… and prevented unless it was expressly decided to create limited conditions where they could see or come into contact with one another because it would serve [the CIA’s] intelligence-gathering objectives to allow it.

252. A common feature for many detainees was the four-month isolation regime. During this period of over 120 days, absolutely no human contact was granted with anyone but masked, silent guards. There’s not meant to be anything to hold onto. No familiarity, no comfort, nobody to talk to, no way out. It’s a long time to be all alone with your thoughts.

a. Careful physical conditioning of detainee and cell

253. In the process of being transferred into secret detention, all detainees are physically screened in order to assess their health and conditioning, identify any injuries or scars they may bear, and get a complete picture to compare them against once they are in detention. These screenings, for which the subject is stripped naked, used a body chart, similar to the inventory diagrams provided by rent-a-car companies upon leasing a vehicle, on which specific marks are noted. In every case, the subject is videotaped or at least photographed naked before transfer.

254. The air in many cells emanated from a ventilation hole in the ceiling, which was often controlled to produce extremes of temperature: sometimes so hot one would gasp for breath,sometimes freezing cold.

255. Many detainees described air conditioning for deliberate discomfort.

256. Detainees were exposed at times to over-heating in the cell; at other times drafts of freezing breeze.

257. Detainees never experienced natural light or natural darkness, although most were blindfolded many times so they could see nothing.

b. Permanent surveillance

258. Detainees speak hatefully about the surveillance cameras, positioned so that in every inch of the cell they would be observed.

259. Detainees were also listened to by interrogators, over hidden microphones in the walls.

260. Notwithstanding the presence of video cameras inside the cells, masked prison guards regularly looked in and knocked on the door of the cell, demanding detainees to raise their hands to show that they are alive.

c. Mundane routines become unforgettable memories

261. Breakfast was delivered in the morning, followed by lunch in the early afternoon. The morning food was typically two or three triangles of cheese with no foil, two slices of tomato, some boiled potatoes, bread and olives. The afternoon food was typically boiled white rice with sliced luncheon meat.

262. On some special occasions, including certain religious holidays, special foods including cooked meat with sauce, nuts and dates, fresh fruit and vegetables, or pieces of chocolate were delivered to the cells. There was even provision for treats like unwrapped candy bars and dessert cakes.

263. Special routines developed around the delivery of food. The light bulb, which was always on, would be briefly turned off; the food would be delivered; and then the light bulb would be turned back on again. There was a hatch in the door of the cell for delivery of food but it was completelyunpredictable whether the guards would use the hatch, or open the doors and bring the food in.

264. Detainees had a bucket for a toilet, which was about a foot deep and ten inches in diameter.

265. At time the electricity supply went dead. The music stopped and the light went out. For a brief period one could heard different voices shouting, some more distant than others but all incoherent.

d. Exertion of physical and psychological stress

266. There was a shackling ring in the wall of the cell, about half a metre up off the floor. Detainees’ hands and feet were clamped in handcuffs and leg irons. Bodies were regularly forced into contorted shapes and chained to this ring for long, painful periods.

267. Most persons in CIA custody attempted sooner or later to resist or protest their treatment and interrogation. Yet their efforts would largely be in vain. According to one source involved in CIA interrogation: “you know they are starting to crack when they come back at you; when they get really vocal or they try to challenge your authority. So you hold out… you push them over the edge”.

268. The sound most commonly heard in cells was a constant, low-level hum of white noise from loudspeakers. Other recollections speak of an external humming noise, like aircraft, engines or a generator. The constant noise was punctuated by blasts of loud Western music – rock music, rap music and thumping beats, or distorted verses from the Koran, or irritating noises – thunder, planes taking off, cackling laughter, the screams of women and children.

269. Detainees were subjected to relentless noise and disturbance were deprived of the chance to sleep.

270. The torture music was turned on, or at least made much louder, as punishment for perceived infractions like raising one’s voice, calling out, or not waving quickly enough when guards demanded a response from you.

271. The gradual escalation of applied physical and psychological exertion, combined in some cases with more concentrated pressure periods for the purposes of interrogation, is said to have caused many of those held by the CIA to develop enduring psychiatric and mental problems.

The report also describes why these details matter, why it is crucial for us, the free, to undrestand the prisoners and the conditions they are subject to:

i. Re-humanising the people held in secret detention

232. The policy of secret detentions and renditions pursued by the current US administration has created a dangerous precedent of dehumanisation. Many of the people caught up in the CIA’s global spider’s web208 are rightly described as “ghost prisoners”209 because they have been made invisible for many years

233. Meanwhile the US Government’s descriptions of its captives in the “war on terror” can only serve to exacerbate this dehumanising effect. The Administration routinely speaks of “aliens”, “deadly enemies” and “faceless terrorists,” with the clear intention of dehumanising its detainees in the eyes of the American population. The NGO community, for its part, calls them “ghost prisoners”.

234. By characterising the people held in secret detention as “different” from us – not as humans, but as ghosts, aliens or terrorists – the US Government tries to lead us into the trap of thinking they are not like us, they are not subjects of the law, therefore their human rights do not deserve protection.

235. President Bush has laid this trap on multiple occasions as a means of diverting attention from the abusive conditions in which certain detainees in US custody are being held.211 Our team heard first-hand how distinctions are drawn in the mind of guards and interrogators: in an interview with one of our CIA sources who has extensive knowledge of detainee treatment, we asked whether a known form of detainee treatment should be considered as abusive. “Here’s my question,” replied our source. “Was the guy a terrorist? ‘Cause if he’s a terrorist then I figure he got what was coming to him. I’ve met a lot of them and one thing I know for sure is that they ain’t human – they ain’t like you and me.”

236. Yet what has struck me most often as I have examined the cases of scores of people held in secret detention – some of whom I have met – is precisely the opposite: these detainees’ ordeals have affected me profoundly as I have always thought of them as fellow human beings. The worst criminals, even those who deserve the harshest punishment, must be given humane treatment and a fair trial. This, moreover, is what makes us a civilised society.

237. It is for these reasons that we must combat their being seen as “ghost prisoners” by repeatedly pointing out that persons detained in the course of counter-terrorist operations are and remain human beings whose human rights must be protected and who are entitled to humane treatment as laid down in the ECHR. In this section of my report I have set out expressly to place the emphasis on the human aspects of these people held in secret detention.

We can be sure that the American Psychological Association, fond of issuing resolutions against torture as it is, will have not one word to utter about the existence of these torture centers or about the systematic use of psychological torture techniques in them. After all, the misuse of psychological knowledge for evil is no concern of the APA, if that evil is done by the United States government, with the aid of United States psychologists. The APA, after all, puts such psychologists on its decision-making panels rather than censure them.

Authors Website: http://soldzresearch.com/stephensoldz

Authors Bio: Stephen Soldz is psychoanalyst, psychologist, public health researcher, and faculty member at the Institute for the Study of Violence of the Boston Graduate School of Psychoanalysis. He is a member of Roslindale Neighbors for Peace and Justice. He maintains the Psyche, Science, and Society blog.

Source: The Christian Science Monitor

Commentary > Daniel Schorr

from the June 8, 2007 edition

New White House Plan: Keep US troops in Iraq permanently.

Permanent bases will damage America’s image in the Middle East.

Washington – President Bush used to be fond of saying that American troops would stay in Iraq as long as needed and not a day longer. He isn’t saying that anymore.

The new word from the White House is that American troops would be stationed in Iraq permanently on the “Korean model.” The analogy is a little strained. The United States has helped to mend the rift between North and South Korea since 1953. But South Korea has had no internal insurgency to worry about.

The plan for permanent bases in Iraq must have been long in the making. The president ignored a recommendation of the Baker-Hamilton Commission that he state that America seeks no permanent bases in Iraq. At one point last year, the Senate and House passed an amendment to the military-spending bill banning the establishment of permanent bases in Iraq. The bill went to conference and then the ban on bases, adopted by both chambers, mysteriously disappeared.

The building of four bases along with a gigantic new American embassy in the Green Zone on the Tigris River has been moving along rapidly. The bases will have runways two miles long to accommodate the largest American planes. The Balad base north of Baghdad covers 14 square miles. Another base is planned for the area that was ancient Babylon.

The new embassy, which will be the largest American mission in the world, will be complete with swimming pool and commissary. Retired General Anthony Zinni has said that permanent bases are “a stupid idea.” He said that they will damage America’s image in the whole region.

These huge installations must be intended for more than Iraqi stabilization. Former President Jimmy Carter said in a speech in February of last year that “the reason we went into Iraq was to establish a permanent military base in the Gulf region.” And few are missing the point that bases in Iraq will keep American might on Iran’s doorstep.

• Daniel Schorr is a senior news analyst at National Public Radio.