Will Eric Holder's appointee follow the Truth wherever it goes?

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The Daily Show dissects identity politics in the US Senate confirmation of Judge Sonia Sotomayor

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The Daily Show schools Fox on Iran-Contra and Ollie North

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Iran-Contra's 'Lost Chapter'

By Robert Parry (A Special Report)
June 30, 2008

As historians ponder George W. Bush’s disastrous presidency, they may wonder how Republicans perfected a propaganda system that could fool tens of millions of Americans, intimidate Democrats, and transform the vaunted Washington press corps from watchdogs to lapdogs.

Iran Divided and the 'October Surprise'

Robert Parry
June 24, 2009

Iran’s current political divisions can be traced back to a controversy nearly three decades ago when Iran faced war with Iraq and became entwined with U.S. and Israeli political maneuvers that set all three countries on a dangerous course that continues to this day.

Veteran Investigative Journalist Bob Parry on the Iran-Contra Scandal and the Perils of Reporting It

Investigative journalist Robert Parry helped expose the Iran-Contra scandal in the 1980s while working as a reporter for the Associated Press and Newsweek. He joins us from Washington. [includes rush transcript]

Cheney Learned Iran-Contra Lessons

Jonathan Schwarz
May 9, 2009

Editor’s Note: The Iran-Contra Affair of the 1980s was the “missing link” connecting Watergate and the national security scandals of the 1970s to the restoration of the imperial presidency under George W. Bush and Dick Cheney this decade.

Other dangerous patterns also were established during Iran-Contra, including a bullying Republican Party aided by right-wing attack groups, a timid Democratic opposition, and a feckless Washington news media unwilling to do the hard work of accountability.

Interestingly, one key person who “got” this bigger picture was Cheney, who was White House chief of staff during the collapse of the imperial presidency in the 1970s; was a chief congressional defender of the Iran-Contra criminals; and then oversaw the restoration of the imperial presidency after 9/11.

From that experience, Cheney also gained an understanding of how important cover-ups could be in this process, as Jonathan Schwarz notes in this guest essay:

In a new article by Stephen "W.W. Beauchamp" Hayes, former Vice President Cheney gripes extensively about the Obama administration. It's exactly what you'd expect.

Iran Contra 2.0: How the Bush Admin Lied to Congress and Armed Fatah to Provoke Palestinian Civil War Aiming to Overthrow Hamas

In its latest issue, Vanity Fair reports that the White House tried to organize the armed overthrow of the Hamas-led goverment after Hamas swept Palestinian elections two years ago. According to the article, the Bush administration lied to Congress and boosted military support for rival Palestinian faction Fatah in the aim of provoking a Palestinian civil war they thought Hamas would lose. Vanity Fair dubbed the episode “Iran Contra 2.0”—a reference to the Reagan administration’s funding of Nicaraguan Contras by covertly selling arms to Iran. We speak with David Rose, the journalist who broke the story. [includes rush transcript]

Pentagon Relies on Iran-Contra Figure for Denying Afghan Mass Killing

Meanwhile, one of the Pentagon’s key “sources” for its denial of the death toll from the recent mass killing of civilians in the Afghan village of Azizabad has been revealed to be Fox News correspondent Oliver North. North was indicted and then later pardoned in the 1980s for lying to Congress about the Iran-Contra scandal.

Defense Secretary Nominee Robert Gates Tied to Iran-Contra Scandal and the Secret Arming of Saddam Hussein

President Bush nominated former CIA director Robert Gates on Wednesday to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense. We take a look at Gates’ role at the CIA in connection to the Iran-Contra scandal and the secret arming of Saddam Hussein with former CIA analyst Mel Goodman, who testified before the Senate in 1991 against the nomination of Gates as CIA director, and investigative journalist Bob Parry who helped expose Iran-Contra. [includes rush transcript]

Robert Gates’ Former CIA Branch Chief and a CIA Analyst Who Testified Against Him on the Politicization of Intel During Iran-Contra

Robert Gates, President Bush’s nominee to replace Donald Rumsfeld as Secretary of Defense is facing his Senate confirmation hearings today. We speak with two former CIA analysts who worked with Gates at the Agency. Ray McGovern was Gates’ CIA branch chief in the early 1970s and Jennifer Glaudemans is a former CIA analyst who was asked to testify at the 1991 confirmation hearings for Gates when he had been nominated to be CIA Director. [includes rush transcript]

Robert Parry: Hillary Clinton Signals Free Pass for Bush

“Former President Bill Clinton’s comment that his wife’s ‘first thing’ as President would be to send him and former President George H.W. Bush on a worldwide fence-mending tour has a political subtext,” reports investigative journalist Robert Parry. “It signals that a second Clinton administration would give a free pass to the second Bush administration on its abuses.” [includes rush transcript]

McCain Sat on Board of Group Linked to Central American Death Squads

As Republicans continue to talk about Bill Ayers, McCain himself is coming under new scrutiny for his ties to a group linked to former Nazi collaborators and right-wing Central American deaths squads. During the early 1980s, McCain was a board member of the US Council for World Freedom, which took part in efforts to overthrow Nicaragua’s Sandinista government. The Council later went on to become a major figure in the Iran-Contra scandal. The Reagan administration defied a congressional ban to secretly funnel weapons to the Contras, the US-backed proxy group organized to violently overthrow the Sandinistas. McCain said he resigned from the Council’s board in 1984.

Robert Parry: Why Are McCain Backers So Angry?

“From Republicans at political rallies to GOP lawmakers on TV talk shows, McCain-Palin supporters are angry, very angry—and they seem to think their anger justifies whatever they do: from calling Barack Obama a ‘terrorist’ to shouting ‘kill him’ and ‘off with his head’—to getting huffy when their violent rhetoric is challenged,” writes investigative reporter Robert Parry, editor of ConsortiumNews.com. [includes rush transcript]

Secrecy News reveals official censorship of our shared narrative by omission of covert actions

Our official version of events is a tapestry of knowing lies. The Federation of American Scientists (FAS) have posted an important revelation about our affairs in South America under the Nixon administration; namely, covert actions to destabilize Uruguay were omitted under suspicious circumstances. Read the whole article for the surprise ending.

State Dept Alters Stance on Uruguay History August 4th, 2009 by Steven Aftergood

In the early 1970s, the Nixon Administration plotted to interfere in Uruguay’s presidential elections in order to block the rise of the leftist Frente Amplio coalition. But when the State Department published its official history of U.S. relations with Latin America during the Nixon era last month, there was no mention of any such activities. Instead, the State Department Office of the Historian said that Uruguay-related records could not be posted on the Department website because of “space constraints.” Following repeated inquiries, however, the Historian’s Office revised its position last week and said it would include Uruguay-related records in its Nixon history after all.

The United States should work “overtly and covertly” to blunt the political appeal of the Frente Amplio and to diminish its chances for victory in the Uruguayan presidential elections, advised one declassified document (pdf) from 1971. Several important documentary records of that turbulent period were compiled by the National Security Archive in 2002. See “Nixon: ‘Brazil Helped Rig the Uruguayan Elections,’ 1971″ edited by Carlos Osorio.

Meanwhile, urban guerrillas who were violently challenging the governments of several Latin American countries drew the worried attention of U.S. intelligence officials. In particular, the Uruguayan Marxist revolutionary group known as the Tupamaros, which murdered a U.S. AID official in 1970, “has had a spectacular and rapid rise to prominence during the last few years,” according to a 1971 CIA analysis entitled “The Latin American Guerrilla Today” (pdf).

But none of this concern over Uruguay could be discerned from the State Department’s official history of U.S. policy towards the region. A July 10, 2009 State Department press release announcing the publication of the latest online volume of the Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) on American Republics, 1969-1972, mentioned almost every Latin American country except for Uruguay. The original Preface of the new FRUS volume (pdf) made the peculiar assertion that: “Due to space constraints, relations with… Uruguay… are not covered here.” This assertion is doubly strange since the new FRUS volume was only published online, not in hardcopy, so that “space constraints” are hardly a factor.

Read the rest here.

Scahill tells Olberman about our dark Prince of Blackwater

Jeremy Scahill has appeared on Countdown to discuss with Keith Olberman the game-changing charges of murder against our homegrown neo-Crusader himself, Eric Prince, who explicitly advocates a holy war against Islam, sending mentally unfit mercenaries to "the sandbox" to "kill hajiis."

It's important to note what Scahill reports about the affidavits: they also were given to the feds, and the Justice Department declined to confirm or deny the existence of an investigation of Prince, who has deep family ties to the sources of funding for the extreme Religious Right and close connections with powerful Bushies.

How more clear can it get? Bush himself preached a bogus holy war only five days after 9/11.

Bush vows to rid the world of 'evil-doers'

September 16, 2001 Posted: 4:54 PM EDT (2054 GMT)

By Manuel Perez-Rivas
CNN Washington Bureau

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- President George W. Bush said Sunday he is confident the nation will rebound from the week's terrorist attacks, and he urged Americans to go back to work on Monday knowing that their government is determined to "rid the world of the evil-doers."

"Tomorrow, when you get back to work, work hard like you always have. But we've been warned. We've been warned there are evil people in this world. We've been warned so vividly," Bush said. "And we'll be alert. Your government is alert. The governors and mayors are alert that evil folks still lurk out there. As I said yesterday, people have declared war on America and they have made a terrible mistake."

"My administration has a job to do and we're going to do it. We will rid the world of the evil-doers," he said.

Orly Taitz tries her myth-jacking voodoo on MSNBC's David Shuster

Via Huffington Post

Dobbs's attempt to insult Maddow bounces right back in his face

Via Huffington Post

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Shuster interviews Harper's legal affairs contributing editor Scott Horton

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Does Dick CHeney have bodies to hide all over the world?

Are the ghosts of his victims coming back to haunt Dick Cheney?

H/t psychoanalystsopposewar.org/blog/

See also "More on Cheney's Pet CIA Project" by Scott Horton in his No Comment blog on Harpers.org

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The precise ignorance of John Yoo

Keith Olberman's co-host David Shuster and Harper's Magazine legal affairs contributing editor Scott Horton completely demolish the ludicrous arguments made by John Yoo regarding the permission slips for torture he concocted for the Bush administration. Yoo's arguments are precise in only one sense: they precisely ignore inconvenient evidence.

Is this what a consigliere looks like?

H/t psychoanalystsopposewar.org

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5 cases of myth-jacking from 1947 to today

Allow me to ask: What are think tanks for?

"[T]hink tanks”... monitor and adjust governance norms and networks by using research, analysis, and advocacy to structure discourse about social problems and solutions among multiple elites and in the popular imagination.” http://etd.library.pitt.edu/ETD/available/etd-08192005-162045/

They exist for myth-making. Compare five cases:

1) Pakistani military strategist Colonel Akbar Khan conceived the concept of jihad to offset the lack of military balance between the two emerging enemies. Akbar Khan's concept of jihad was no more than subversion in the enemy country, but it was couched in jihadi terms. He himself took over the grand-sounding name of a Muslim conqueror as his nom de guerre. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG17Df01.html

2) Z. Brzezinski: "Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention." http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

3) Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American “death squads” through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his “global war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007.

Under Bush’s double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn’t. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed “bad guys” should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture.
http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/071509.html

4) The American Conservative Union asked FedEx for a check for $2 million to $3 million in return for the group’s endorsement in a bitter legislative dispute, then flipped and sided with UPS after FedEx refused to pay.

For the $2 million plus, ACU offered a range of services that included: “Producing op-eds and articles written by ACU’s Chairman David Keene and/or other members of the ACU’s board of directors. (Note that Mr. Keene writes a weekly column that appears in The Hill.)”

The conservative group’s remarkable demand — black-and-white proof of the longtime Washington practice known as “pay for play” — was contained in a private letter to FedEx , which was provided to POLITICO.

The letter exposes the practice by some political interest groups of taking stands not for reasons of pure principle, as their members and supporters might assume, but also in part because a sponsor is paying big money.
http://www.politico.com/news/stories/0709/25072.html

5) "That about sums everything up: War Crimes are heinous and intolerable acts that all decent people reject; "anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated"; and War Criminals must not be allowed in any positions of authority . . . . except when the War Crimes in question are committed by Americans, in which case all investigations and accountability must be blocked and those who defended and even approved them are perfectly welcomed in our highest positions of authority (including, ironically, overseeing our war in Afghanistan). See also, quite relatedly: this post from earlier today on how we continue to shield from any accountability the clear and serious crimes committed by Bush officials in how they spied on Americans.. . . Let's just repeat the sermon from the anonymous Obama official in demanding an investigation into crimes by this Afghan warlord: 'We believe that anyone suspected of war crimes should be thoroughly investigated.' It doesn't appear that they know what the word 'anyone' means."
http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/07/11/accountability/index.html

Col. Akbar Khan and Zbigniew Brzezinski are just two of the godfathers of myth-jacking

Pepe Escobar: Pakistan's army leaders have been masters of the double game since the 1980s. Could you briefly describe how they deploy their stealth?

Arif Jamal: Actually, the strategy of playing a double game is as old as the country. When British India was partitioned into two dominions in 1947, Pakistan faced an enemy in India which was several times bigger, more populated, resourceful and most importantly militarily more powerful. It was not good sense to take on a far more powerful enemy in a conventional military way.

Pakistani military strategist Colonel Akbar Khan conceived the concept of jihad to offset the lack of military balance between the two emerging enemies. Akbar Khan's concept of jihad was no more than subversion in the enemy country, but it was couched in jihadi terms. He himself took over the grand-sounding name of a Muslim conqueror as his nom de guerre.

From that time onwards, the Pakistani military leaders kept inciting the local Muslim population in the Indian-controlled state of Jammu and Kashmir to subversion and turning subversion into a guerrilla war until 1980, when they decided to wage a real jihad in Afghanistan [against the Soviets]. At the same time, Pakistan never abandoned the diplomatic option of resolving its conflicts with India. The Pakistan army supported a full-scale anti-Soviet jihad or subversive guerrilla war in Afghanistan. Publicly, Pakistan denied any support to the Afghan mujahideen. The only time Pakistan claimed responsibility for subversion in a neighboring country was when the Soviets withdrew from Afghanistan [in 1989]. It was a victory for the jihad policy. http://www.atimes.com/atimes/South_Asia/KG17Df01.html

Zbigniew Brzezinski:
How Jimmy Carter and I Started the Mujahideen

Interview of Zbigniew Brzezinski Le Nouvel Observateur (France), Jan 15-21, 1998, p. 76*

Q: The former director of the CIA, Robert Gates, stated in his memoirs ["From the Shadows"], that American intelligence services began to aid the Mujahadeen in Afghanistan 6 months before the Soviet intervention. In this period you were the national security adviser to President Carter. You therefore played a role in this affair. Is that correct?

Brzezinski: Yes. According to the official version of history, CIA aid to the Mujahadeen began during 1980, that is to say, after the Soviet army invaded Afghanistan, 24 Dec 1979. But the reality, secretly guarded until now, is completely otherwise: Indeed, it was July 3, 1979 that President Carter signed the first directive for secret aid to the opponents of the pro-Soviet regime in Kabul. And that very day, I wrote a note to the president in which I explained to him that in my opinion this aid was going to induce a Soviet military intervention.

Q: Despite this risk, you were an advocate of this covert action. But perhaps you yourself desired this Soviet entry into war and looked to provoke it?

Brzezinski: It isn't quite that. We didn't push the Russians to intervene, but we knowingly increased the probability that they would.

Q: When the Soviets justified their intervention by asserting that they intended to fight against a secret involvement of the United States in Afghanistan, people didn't believe them. However, there was a basis of truth. You don't regret anything today?

Brzezinski: Regret what? That secret operation was an excellent idea. It had the effect of drawing the Russians into the Afghan trap and you want me to regret it? The day that the Soviets officially crossed the border, I wrote to President Carter: We now have the opportunity of giving to the USSR its Vietnam war. Indeed, for almost 10 years, Moscow had to carry on a war unsupportable by the government, a conflict that brought about the demoralization and finally the breakup of the Soviet empire.

Q: And neither do you regret having supported the Islamic [integrisme], having given arms and advice to future terrorists?

Brzezinski: What is most important to the history of the world? The Taliban or the collapse of the Soviet empire? Some stirred-up Moslems or the liberation of Central Europe and the end of the cold war?

Q: Some stirred-up Moslems? But it has been said and repeated: Islamic fundamentalism represents a world menace today.

Brzezinski: Nonsense! It is said that the West had a global policy in regard to Islam. That is stupid. There isn't a global Islam. Look at Islam in a rational manner and without demagoguery or emotion. It is the leading religion of the world with 1.5 billion followers. But what is there in common among Saudi Arabian fundamentalism, moderate Morocco, Pakistan militarism, Egyptian pro-Western or Central Asian secularism? Nothing more than what unites the Christian countries.

* There are at least two editions of this magazine; with the perhaps sole exception of the Library of Congress, the version sent to the United States is shorter than the French version, and the Brzezinski interview was not included in the shorter version.

The above has been translated from the French by Bill Blum author of the indispensible, "Killing Hope: US Military and CIA Interventions Since World War II" and "Rogue State: A Guide to the World's Only Superpower" Portions of the books can be read at: <http://members.aol.com/superogue/homepage.htm>

http://www.counterpunch.org/brzezinski.html

Note the mechanistic reduction he makes. That's what ails us. What unites us? Just Our Mother's womb itself. Our myths unite us in a common human cosmos.

And here's another example of the same method in use by the US military and foreign policy establishments.

Bush's Hit Teams

By Robert Parry
July 15, 2009

And, at least inside and near the war zones of Iraq and Afghanistan, Bush’s “global war on terror” appears to have recreated what was known during the Vietnam War as Operation Phoenix, a program that assassinated Vietcong cadre, including suspected communist backers.

Through a classified Pentagon training program known as “Project X,” the lessons of Operation Phoenix from the 1960s were passed on to Third World armies, especially in Latin America, giving a green light to some of the “dirty wars” that swept the region, causing tens of thousands of political murders, widespread use of torture, and secret detentions.

Bush’s alleged plan for global hit teams also has similarities to “Operation Condor” in which South American right-wing military regimes in the 1970s sent assassins on cross-border operations to eliminate “subversives.”

Despite quiet support and encouragement for Latin American “death squads” through much of the 1970s and 1980s, the U.S. government presented itself as the standard-bearer for human rights and criticized American adversaries that engaged in extrajudicial killings, torture and arbitrary detentions.

That gap between American rhetoric and reality widened after 9/11 as Bush announced his “global war on terror,” while continuing to impress the American news media with pretty words about his commitment to human rights – as occurred in his address to the United Nations on Sept. 25, 2007.

Under Bush’s double standards, he took the position that he could override both international law and the U.S. Constitution in deciding who would get basic human rights and who wouldn’t. He saw himself as the final judge of whether people he deemed “bad guys” should live or die, or possibly face indefinite imprisonment and torture.

http://www.consortiumnews.com/2009/071509.html

In other words: he was playing god. This is how we do it! Myth-jacking nations into bogus holy wars is what we do.

Comment on John Pilger's New Statesman article: "Mourn on the 4th of July"

O brother, my Brother! What a great treatment of a method of managing electorates I've been calling *myth-jacking.*

Myth is not synonymous with lie; a myth is a metaphorical image of the composition and functioning of the cosmos. The power of myth is to shape the world in which we are enacting this wholly absurd theater of life.

Remember Rummy's myth-jacking memos?
"This mixing of Crusades-like messaging with war imagery, which until now has not been revealed, had become routine. "
http://men.style.com/gq/features/landing?&id=content_9217

National myths deliver us as a people into our Promised or Waste Land, exactly as we load them with our intentions: passengers into life boats, or kittens into burlap sacks?

Our myths, our shared narratives, are as indispensable as a mother's womb.

Benign or malign, either way we get taken for a ride. As Americans, we need to direct our own passage, but we aren't educated and socialized to be self-sovereign citizens.

Instead, we're taught to be loyal subjects, fans, of a political master of a mechanical universe; to shut up and do as we're told; to demonstrate our loyalty by our fervor when presented with patriotic symbols.

We're trained, like pigeons in Skinner boxes, to go kill or die at the whim of an imperious president "for god, king, and country," just like the good old days.

For example: We were jacked to war by myths of Iraqi WMDs. The myths themselves were the WMDs.

In this way, the power of myth is being used to power weapons-grade domestic propaganda.

Our myth says: God loves us the most, that's why we're destined to rule the earth forever, amen. God bless America! (God damn the rest of you.)

Since we're doing the work of the Big Guy Upstairs, says the myth, we can do no wrong; likewise, anyone who opposes us also opposes God, making them 'evil-doers' of whom we are duty bound to rid the world.

Factual arguments, however well phrased, often fail to move electorates, but the power of myth never fails

The Associated Press's special report on Pentagon "influence operations"

knowbuddhau

Bravo, o brother my Brother. This is the most exciting potential of the Web (to me): busting myths, loaded with malign intent, even as propagandists deploy them.

With 27,000 "influence operators," a $4.7 billion budget, and the corporate media's obsequiousness (with a few notable exceptions), I wonder: what other attempts to jack our shared narrative are under way?

I'm still stunned by your 11 Feb 09 article in Harper's.

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Pentagon Targeted and Mistreated Journalists, AP Head Charges
http://harpers.org/archive/2009/02/hbc-90004359

The Associated Press's special report on Pentagon "influence operations" can be read here [ http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29039384/ ]. The Pentagon's Public Affairs Office has been one of the last redoubts of the Neoconservatives. Burrowed Bush era figures remain in key positions in the office, which had responsibility for implementation of some of the Rumsfeld Pentagon's most controversial strategies in which

***the American public was targeted with practices previously associated with battlefield psy-ops.***
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~

Doesn't that constitute our own military
firing on us? Are the influence operators any different than snipers? And the infamous "Message Force Multipliers"?

A) Hide intentions;
B) Fire "live" rounds at target audiences with high-power microphones etc. with the intention of forcing a change in behavior against the will of the target;
C) Make career-advancing killings.

Or we could see it as the attempt to hack into the psyches of Americans as if we were mere voting-machines on two legs.

My fellow psychologists have weaponized psyche itself, and the DoD has turned against us.

To our NSA-type fiends, with bodies to hide all over the world, are we, the sovereign citizens, now the enemy?

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9:41 am, May 29, 2009

mblips

Thank you for drawing my attention to the Harper's piece. The MSNBC link does not work. Could you check and repost.

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12:13 pm, May 29, 2009

knowbuddhau

http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/29060453/

There's a slight difference there at the end. Thanks for pointing it out, I've been habitually posting that dead link for months now.

The actual report is proving more elusive than I expected. Prof. Horton, a little help?

See also
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/05/pentagon-boosts-spending_n_1644 10.html

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/tag/pentagon-propaganda

Permalink

9:37 pm, May 29, 2009

Show us the Abu Ghraib photos of acts taken in the name of We, the People

Scott Horton, in The Daily Beast, details the Pentagon's dishonest response: blame the messenger.

The Pentagon is denying the facts: photographs of Abu Ghraib torture are even more sexually explicit than first reported, including rape and sodomy, writes The Daily Beast's Scott Horton, who has obtained specific and detailed corroboration of the photos.

The Daily Beast has confirmed that the photographs of abuses at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison which President Obama, in a reversal, decided not to release, depict sexually explicit acts, including a uniformed soldier receiving oral sex from a female prisoner, a government contractor engaged in an act of sodomy with a male prisoner and scenes of forced masturbation, forced exhibition and penetration involving phosphorous sticks and brooms.

These descriptions come on the heals of a British report yesterday about the photographs that contained some of these revelations—and whose credibility was questioned by the Pentagon.

The Daily Beast has obtained specific corroboration of the British account, which appeared in the London Daily Telegraph, from several reliable sources, including a highly credible senior military officer with first-hand knowledge who provided even more detail about the graphic photographs that have been withheld from the public by the Obama administration.

Read more...

Psychologists were hacking human psyches like mere machines

Do CIA Cables Show Doctors Monitoring Torture?

by Sheri Fink, ProPublica - May 28, 2009 8:27 am EDT

A version of this story was published on Salon

The new information comes from descriptions of cables, classified as top secret and relating to the interrogation of Abu Zubaydah, that were transmitted from a Central Intelligence Agency field station to the agency's Langley, Va., headquarters nearly every day between Aug. 1 and Aug. 18 that year.

The descriptions of the cables (here [2] and here [3]) reveal that a daily "medical update" and "behavioral comments" along with status and threat updates were sent to CIA headquarters throughout that period. On five occasions between Aug. 4 and Aug. 9, an additional cable was sent containing "medical information" along with such information as the strategies for interrogation sessions, raw intelligence, the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information, and the reactions to those techniques. The fact that medical information was included in these cables hints that Abu Zubaydah was medically monitored during or after being subjected to those techniques. Both professional organizations and human rights groups have rejected as unethical any monitoring role for medical personnel.

A summary of the 34 cables and of a handwritten log book were released to the American Civil Liberties Union earlier this month on orders of U.S. District Judge Alvin Hellerstein, who is presiding over a Freedom of Information Act lawsuit brought by the group. The lawsuit was based on a request for records related to detainee treatment that the ACLU and four other advocacy groups made of the U.S. Departments of Defense, Justice and State and the CIA in 2003. The new summary, known as a Vaughn Index, was released in response to a motion that the ACLU filed in 2007 after then-CIA director Michael Hayden acknowledged that the agency had destroyed videotapes of detainee interrogations in 2005.

The cables themselves have not been made public, and the agency is contesting their release. In response to a request for more detail on the medical information included in the cables and the reasons that information was transmitted from the field site to CIA headquarters, CIA spokesman Paul Gimigliano wrote in an e-mail to ProPublica: "The materials speak for themselves."

The U.S. Department of Justice gave the ACLU other documents [4] this month that suggest the cables are among nearly 550 interrogation-related cables sent from field stations to CIA headquarters between April and December 2002. Among those analyzing the new documents are National Public Radio's Ari Shapiro [5], the Washington Independent's Spencer Ackerman [6] and Firedoglake's Marcy Wheeler [7].

The documents are the latest installment of an ongoing story about the role of doctors and psychologists in the government's efforts to pry information from suspected terrorists. Professional organizations of doctors, nurses, public health practitioners and psychologists have stated their opposition to health professionals' involvement in torture. "The AMA has taken the clear stand that the participation of physicians in torture and interrogation is a violation of core ethical values," the American Medical Association said in a statement last Friday. Last month, the AMA sent a letter to President Barack Obama reiterating, as it did during the Bush administration, that the association's ethical code prohibits physicians from participating in torture or coercive interrogation.

However, there is evidence that health personnel, at least some of them physicians, have been involved in interrogations. For example Col. Thomas M. Pappas, former chief of military intelligence at Abu Ghraib, who was interviewed as part of the Taguba investigation [8], testified that a psychiatrist and another doctor monitored interrogations [9] at the prison and had the final say in what aspects of the interrogation plan were implemented.

The question raised by the cables is, How deep was the involvement of physicians or other health professionals in the actual interrogations at CIA "black sites" such as the one where Abu Zubaydah was held?

Previously released documents show that Bush officials overseeing the waterboarding of Abu Zubaydah saw the involvement of medical personnel as crucial because it could help prevent prosecution of interrogators under U.S. law. As ProPublica previously reported [10], Assistant Attorney General Jay S. Bybee signed a memo on August 1, 2002 spelling out those concerns and the terms under which interrogators could waterboard and slap Abu Zubaydah, subject him to "cramped confinement" and stress positions, and shove him into flexible walls.

"The constant presence of personnel with medical training who have the authority to stop the interrogation should it appear it is medically necessary indicates that it is not your intent to cause severe physical pain," the memo said.

Abu Zubaydah began cooperating in late April under questioning by Ali Soufan, a Federal Bureau of Investigation agent who said he did not use coercive methods. In congressional testimony this month, Soufan disclosed that there was a "CIA medical team supporting us" when he and other FBI and CIA personnel first spoke with Abu Zubaydah. Soufan said the medical team insisted that Abu Zubaydah, who was injured during capture and in danger of dying, be taken to a hospital for treatment.

It is unclear whether the same CIA medical team that evaluated Abu Zubaydah's health problems in the spring was still caring for him in August when he was waterboarded. Nor is it clear precisely how health personnel might have been asked to cross the line from providing medical care to participating in or supporting the interrogations, which Soufan and other sources have described as becoming increasingly abusive under the instruction of a former military Survival, Evasion, Resistance, and Escape (SERE) training psychologist contracted by the CIA. Soufan and others, including another psychologist employed by the CIA, protested the escalating techniques and left the site. The new documents do not indicate whether medical personnel might also have objected.

In a cover letter accompanying the new Vaughn Index, acting U.S. attorney Lev L. Dassin wrote, "The Government is ... acknowledging that August 2002 was the month during which Abu Zubaydah was subjected to the most intensive interrogations." An Aug. 4, 2002, cable with the subject "Abu Zubaydah Interrogation" is a typical entry in the Vaughn Index:

This is a four-page cable from the Field to CIA Headquarters. The cable includes information concerning the strategies for interrogation sessions; the use of interrogation techniques to elicit information on terrorist operations against the U.S.; reactions to the interrogation techniques; raw intelligence; a status of threat information, and medical information.

The news that medical information was being transmitted regularly to CIA headquarters throughout the time Abu Zubaydah was being repeatedly waterboarded troubled medical ethics experts interviewed by ProPublica. Normally, health professionals who work at U.S. prisons share inmates' medical information with authorities only "if there's a need to know; for example if someone has a seizure disorder, we put in a medical order for a bottom bunk," Dr. Dean Rieger, chief medical officer for Correct Care Solutions, a healthcare management company for correctional facilities, said in an interview with ProPublica. Rieger, who has been involved in corrections for more than three decades and who coauthors a column on medical ethics for the Society of Correctional Physicians, said it would be problematic to continue sharing an inmate's medical information with authorities overseeing a system "that creates the harm in the first place."

University of Pennsylvania bioethicist Arthur Caplan agreed. At that point, "you gotta start protesting and stop transmitting," he said in an interview. "The issue isn't privacy violations, it's complicity ... You're part of the torture team at that point if you're assessing injuries and saying whether the person's capable of enduring more."

Legal memos written in 2005 suggest the CIA had reached precisely the opposite conclusion -- that waterboarding and other harsh interrogations should involve personnel from the CIA's Office of Medical Services, including its physicians.

A recently declassified Justice Department memo discussed the involvement the OMS eventually had in supporting interrogations. That memo [11], quoting still-classified OMS guidelines from December 2004, said that the "use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician." Another memo [12] said that OMS doctors and psychologists had been consulted about the effects of using several techniques together, such as "when an insult slap is simultaneously combined with water dousing or a kneeling stress position, or when wall standing is simultaneously combined with an abdominal slap and water dousing" and concluded they would not cause severe pain.

Medical personnel were also given the responsibility of monitoring the interrogations for safety. "Should it appear at any time that Abu Zubaydah is experiencing severe pain or suffering, the medical personnel on hand will stop the use of any technique," Bybee's 2002 memo said.

It is unclear whether the "medical personnel" designated to monitor Abu Zubaydah's interrogation included M.D.s. "There is no role for physicians in those practices," Dr. Otmar Kloiber, secretary-general of the World Medical Association, told ProPublica. Kloiber said that physician involvement in interrogations increases the chances that questioning will devolve into abuse and torture. A physician's reassuring presence can give questioners a green light to escalate physical and mental pressure.

In a confidential International Committee of the Red Cross report [13] made public by New York Review of Books contributor Mark Danner last month, Abu Zubaydah described to ICRC interviewers days of being waterboarded to the point he believed he would die, slammed into hard and flexible walls, and confined in a small box where one of his wounds reopened and began to bleed. "Eventually," Abu Zubaydah said, "the torture was stopped by the intervention of the doctor."

The ICRC report also reveals that other detainees who spent time in the CIA's black sites perceived that some staff who treated them or monitored their interrogations were physicians.

The potential presence of physicians as opposed to other types of personnel raises crucial questions.

Numerous officials, both Republican and Democrat, have characterized waterboarding as torture. There is widespread agreement among doctors -- whether employed by the military, other government agencies, or not -- that ethical standards prohibit physicians from using medical knowledge or information about patients to support torture.

The World Medical Association, which lists 85 countries including the U.S. as members, was established in 1947 to uphold independence and ethical behavior among physicians after the horrors of Nazi medicine were revealed. It is arguably the world's key arbiter of medical ethics.

Earlier this month, the group's governing council issued a resolution reaffirming the group's long-standing position that physicians are forbidden from "participating in, or even being present during, the practice of torture or other forms of cruel, inhuman, or degrading procedures" and must denounce those acts whenever they're aware of them.

According to officials from the WMA and the Norwegian Medical Association, which put forward the resolution, the original draft made specific reference to U.S. detention facilities. At the WMA council meeting in Jerusalem earlier this month, intense discussion ensued between normally staid physicians over whether to remove mention of the U.S. and make the language more generic.

WMA officials declined to say who took up which side.

"It got heated enough I had to call a short recess and have a cooling-off period," WMA chair Dr. Edward Hill told ProPublica. Hill, a former president of the American Medical Association, said the U.S. delegation stayed out of the debate.

But the American delegation made its views clear, according to Dr. Trond Markestad, who drafted the original resolution and who chairs the ethics committee in the Norwegian Medical Association. "They felt it was a bit unfair, wasn't really correct, to single out that one [example] since there were so many wars going on and so many things happening all over the world and since they'd already addressed this nationally."

The final version of the WMA resolution passed unanimously after language naming the U.S. was removed. The resolution condemns "reports worldwide" of "deeply unsettling practices by health professionals, including direct participation in the infliction of ill-treatment, monitoring specific methods of ill-treatment, and participation in interrogation processes."

The group also resolved to support physicians who refuse to participate in or condone torture. Kloiber told ProPublica that WMA members are concerned, for example, that physicians in areas where sharia law is adopted are being asked to carry out punishments such as amputations [14].

The WMA resolution calls on national medical associations, such as the AMA, to investigate breaches of fundamental medical ethics among physicians. But the AMA has not made public whether its ethics and judicial body has ever investigated or sanctioned physicians for participating in torture or cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment.

Last Friday, the Center for Constitutional Rights in New York launched an advocacy campaign [15] that aims "to hold accountable healers that have harmed." The group is encouraging citizens to file complaints against health professionals suspected of participating in torture and to support legislation, such as a proposed bill in New York state [16], that prohibits health professionals from participating in torture or the improper treatment of prisoners at home or abroad.

Tags: Abu Zubaydah, ACLU, al-Qaida, American Medical Association, CIA, Department of Justice, Detainee Treatment Scandal, Torture, Waterboarding, World Medical Association

NYT plays word games with our shared narrative

The CIA’s Congressional Mumblers and Dissemblers
Originally published by Ken Silverstein in Washington Babylon on Harpers.org. Emphasis added.

From Jeff Stein:

A former deep-cover CIA operative says the spy agency’s congressional briefers routinely shade the truth or hide facts altogether from congressional overseers. “They mumble, they dissemble, and there’s a lot of ‘on the one hand . . .’” said the retired official, who spent 25 years as a CIA operations officer but now writes blistering, unauthorized critiques of the spy agency using the pen name “Ishmael Jones.” …

The CIA deploys so many briefers to the Hill it’s hard for both the agency and intelligence committee members to reconstruct who said what to whom, he added. “Its enormous numbers of employees have led to briefings being handled by groups, with vague chains of command, so that it may have been difficult to pin down what was said, when it was said, and who was in charge,” Jones said of the CIA interrogation briefings.

Jones also charged that, contrary to beliefs that the agency has a political agenda, “In reality the CIA is loyal only to itself. As long as Mrs. Pelosi supported its bureaucratic lifestyle, it supported her, but when she attacked it, it fought back. The CIA may not be able to conduct efficient intelligence operations, but it knows how to survive.” Reports that CIA managers were outraged or demoralized by the water-boarding controversy are wrong, Jones also maintained. To the contrary, he said, they felt that revelations of their interrogators roughing up, or even torturing, detainees made them look tough.

Melvin Goodman details the deception of We, the People, by CIA

Via Consortiumnews.com

The CIA's History of Deception

Melvin Goodman

"Let me be clear about this,” CIA director Leon Panetta told his troops last week, “it was not CIA policy or practice to mislead Congress. That is against our laws and our values.”

Of course, Panetta is entitled to his opinions, but he cannot create his own facts. And, as a long-time member of the House of Representatives, he surely must know that there is a long and substantiated record of CIA deceit and dissembling to the congressional intelligence committees. Here are some highlights of that record:

In 1973, CIA director Richard Helms deceived the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, refusing to acknowledge the role of the CIA in overthrowing the elected government in Chile. Helms falsely testified that the CIA had not passed money to the opposition movement in Chile, and a grand jury was called to see if Helms should be indicted for perjury.

In 1977, the Justice Department brought a lesser charge against Helms, who pleaded nolo contendere; he was fined $2,000 and given a suspended two-year prison sentence. Helms went from the courthouse to the CIA where he was given a hero’s welcome and a gift of $2,000 to cover the fine. It was one of the saddest experiences in my 24 years at CIA.

In the new Ford administration, Secretary of State Kissinger, Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld, and White House chief of staff Dick Cheney orchestrated phony intelligence for the Congress in order to get an endorsement for covert arms shipments to anti-government forces in Angola.

The CIA lied to Sen. Dick Clark, D-Iowa, chairman of the Senate Foreign Relations subcommittee on Africa and a critic of the Agency’s illegal collaborations with the government of South Africa against Angola and Mozambique. Agency briefers exaggerated the classification of their materials so that Senate and House members could not publicize this information.

Agency shields of secrecy and falsehood were extremely effective.

In the 1980s, CIA director William Casey and his deputy, Bob Gates, consistently lied to the congressional oversight committees about their knowledge of the Iran-Contra Affair. Sen. Daniel Moynihan, D-New York, believed that Casey and Gates were running a disinformation campaign against the Senate Intelligence Committee.

Casey even managed to alienate Sen. Barry Goldwater, R-Arizona, a pro-intelligence, conservative who typically walked through barbed wire for the CIA.

Gates’ lies on Iran-Contra led to the Senate Intelligence Committee’s unwillingness to vote him out of the committee in 1987 when he was nominated to be CIA director by President Ronald Reagan. Gates was nominated again in 1991 and this time he was confirmed, but not before the hearings produced rhyme and verse on Gates’ tailoring of intelligence to fit the biases of Bill Casey.

Throughout the 1980s and the early 1990s, Aldrich Ames performed as the most destructive traitor in the history of the CIA, but CIA directors Gates, William Webster and Jim Woolsey failed to inform the congressional oversight committees of the serious counter-intelligence problems that had been created.

In the late 1980s, the CIA concealed from the Congress that Saddam Hussein was diverting U.S. farm credits through an Atlanta bank to pay for nuclear technology and sophisticated weapons. The chairman of the Senate and House intelligence committees, Sen. Dennis DeConcini, D-Arizona, and Rep. Dan Glickman, D-Kansas, were furious with the deception tactics of CIA briefers.

The greatest CIA disinformation campaign in the Congress took place in 2002-2003, when CIA director George Tenet and his deputy, John McLaughlin, consistently lied about Iraqi training for al Qaeda members on chemical and biological weapons as well as the existence of mobile labs to manufacture such weapons.

Several days before the congressional vote on the authorization to use force, CIA senior analyst Paul Pillar delivered an unclassified memorandum to the Hill with a series of false charges about Iraqi weapons of mass destruction. Pillar’s memorandum and a national intelligence estimate on the same subject were also used to develop Secretary of State Colin Powell’s address to the United Nations in February 2003.

More recently, Rep. Peter Hoekstra, R-Michigan, the ranking minority member of the House Intelligence Committee, documented the dissembling of the CIA to cover-up the Agency’s involvement in a drug interdiction program in Peru that led to the loss of innocent lives. Hoekstra accused CIA director Tenet with misleading the Congress.

The CIA still has not addressed the serious procedural and institutional problems that were exposed in a report from the Office of the Inspector General on the Peru program, which concluded that Agency officials deliberately misled Congress, the White House and the Justice Department.

In closing, Panetta emphasized that it was the CIA’s task to “tell it like it is, even if that’s not what people always want to hear. Keep it up. Our national security depends on it.”

If only that were the case in the 1980s, when the CIA hid from the Congress the intelligence on the decline of the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact or more recently when the CIA tailored intelligence on Iraqi weapons of mass destruction and Iraqi ties to al Qaeda in order to give the Bush administration an intelligence case to go to war.

Panetta should understand that there was far less dissembling to the Congress 35 years ago when the Agency’s Office of General Counsel only had two attorneys, but with the addition of 63 attorneys over the next two decades there was greater politicization of Agency testimony and briefings.

Today there are nearly 200 lawyers with the Office of the General Counsel. Panetta should also understand that it is long past time for him to make sure that the Agency replaces the current acting directors of the Office of the Inspector General and the Office of the General Counsel in order to make sure that the CIA is indeed telling truth to power.

Melvin A. Goodman, a regular contributor to The Public Record where this essay first appeared, is senior fellow at the Center for International Policy and adjunct professor of government at Johns Hopkins University. He spent more than 42 years in the U.S. Army, the Central Intelligence Agency, and the Department of Defense. His most recent book is Failure of Intelligence: The Decline and Fall of the CIA.

Video: Matthew Alexander interrogates DIck Cheney

Via AlterNet.org

Matthew Alexander interrogates Dick Cheney

Matthew Alexander, the interrogator whose team found Zarqawi, turns his skills to an analysis of DIck Cheney's recent speech (originally published May 24, 2009 in Huffington Post):

Former Senior Interrogator in Iraq Dissects Cheney's Lies and Distortions

As a senior interrogator in Iraq (and a former criminal investigator), there was a lesson I learned that served me well: there's more to be learned from what someone doesn't say than from what they do say. Let me dissect former Vice President Dick Cheney's speech on National Security using this model and my interrogation skills.

First, VP Cheney said, "This recruitment-tool theory has become something of a mantra lately... it excuses the violent and blames America for the evil that others do." He further stated, "It is much closer to the truth that terrorists hate this country precisely because of the values we profess and seek to live by, not by some alleged failure to do so." That is simply untrue. Anyone who served in Iraq, and veterans on both sides of the aisle have made this argument, knows that the foreign fighters did not come to Iraq en masse until after the revelations of torture and abuse at Abu Ghraib and Guantanamo Bay. I heard this from captured foreign fighters day in and day out when I was supervising interrogations in Iraq. What the former vice president didn't say is the fact that the dislike of our policies in the Middle East were not enough to make thousands of Muslim men pick up arms against us before these revelations. Torture and abuse became Al Qaida's number one recruiting tool and cost us American lives.

Secondly, the former vice president, in saying that waterboarding is not torture, never mentions the fact that it was the United States and its Allies, during the Tokyo Trials, that helped convict a Japanese soldier for war crimes for waterboarding one of Jimmie Doolittle's Raiders. Have our morals and values changed in fifty years? He also did not mention that George Washington and Abraham Lincoln both prohibited their troops from torturing prisoners of war. Washington specifically used the term "injure" -- no mention of severe mental or physical pain.

Thirdly, the former vice president never mentioned the Senate testimony of Ali Soufan, the FBI interrogator who successfully interrogated Abu Zubaydah and learned the identity of Jose Padilla, the dirty bomber, and the fact that Khalid Sheikh Mohammad (KSM) was the mastermind behind 9/11. We'll never know what more we could have discovered from Abu Zubaydah had not CIA contractors taken over the interrogations and used waterboarding and other harsh techniques. Also, glaringly absent from the former vice president's speech was any mention of the fact that the former administration never brought Osama bin Laden to justice and that our best chance to locate him would have been through KSM or Abu Zubaydah had they not been waterboarded.

In addition, in his continued defense of harsh interrogation techniques (aka torture and abuse), VP Cheney forgets that harsh techniques have ensured that future detainees will be less likely to cooperate because they see us as hypocrites. They are less willing to trust us when we fail to live up to our principles. I experienced this firsthand in Iraq when interrogating high-ranking members of Al Qaida, some of whom decided to cooperate simply because I treated them with respect and civility.

The former vice president is confusing harshness with effectiveness. An effective interrogation is one that yields useful, accurate intelligence, not one that is harsh. It speaks to a fundamental misunderstanding of interrogations, the goal of which is not to coerce information from a prisoner, but to convince a prisoner to cooperate.

Finally, the point that is most absent is that our greatest success in this conflict was achieved without torture or abuse. My interrogation team found Abu Musab Al Zarqawi, the former leader of Al Qaida in Iraq and murderer of tens of thousands. We did this using relationship-building approaches and non-coercive law enforcement techniques. These worked to great effect on the most hardened members of Al Qaida -- spiritual leaders who had been behind the waves of suicide bombers and, hence, the sectarian violence that swept across Iraq. We convinced them to cooperate by applying our intellect. In essence, we worked smarter, not harsher.