The Tea Party, karma and torture

Yesterday we heard from Virginia Psychology Professor Jonathan Haidt about how tea partiers aren’t crazy; they just believe in karma. Today comes word of research showing that those who support torture don’t care as much about gaining information as they do about getting retribution. From Miller-McCune:

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Today's Must Read: How the U.S. got into the torture business

The crass stupidity of this is jaw-dropping. These are the people who led our nation? From today's New York Times comes the report that the United States began torturing people because the Bush Administration couldn't be bothered, or was too stupid, to research the history, source and even the effectiveness of the techniques it employed.

The process was “a perfect storm of ignorance and enthusiasm,” a former C.I.A. official said.

Behind it all? The idea of creating "learned helplessness" -- destroying people's psyche to the point that they acted as if they were pieces of furniture. Sound familiar?

Torture: I've seen this before

I missed this story when it was first printed in 2006, but it chills me. I just realized that I've seen what the New York Times describes, and I saw it on the shores of Lake Michigan.

I caught up to this story today when Andrew Sullivan quoted it in his post about What Enhanced Interrogation Does to People. He is talking about American citizen Jose Padilla, who has been detained and apparently tortured for years. The quoted material below is from the original New York Times story.

In his affidavit, Mr. (Andrew) Patel (Padilla's court-appointed lawyer) said, “I was told by members of the brig staff that Mr. Padilla’s temperament was so docile and inactive that his behavior was like that of ‘a piece of furniture.’ ”

I added the emphasis.

Here's what's so chilling to me. I once knew a human being who was so docile that he was like a piece of furniture. Let's call him Mr. B. I met him in 1971 when I was a college student and worked as a waitress in what was probably the last summer that Mendelson's Atlantic Resort was open in South Haven, Mich.

Mendelson's kept kosher and drew many older Jews who had immigrated from Europe after World War II. Several of them had been in concentration camps. They still had numbers, large and dark blue, tattooed on the outside of their forearms.

What struck me about Mr. B was that he was there, but not there. He would come to breakfast, lunch and dinner, and sit down at the table with the other single men. His hands would be on his lap. he looked straight ahead and slightly down. After I put his plate in front of him, he would pick up his utensils and eat, slowly and mechanically. The other men at the table tried to talk to him, but I never heard him reply.

The busboy and I tried to jolly him up. We tried jokes, gossip. What did we know? We were 20, and we thought we could make anyone laugh. I don't remember that Mr. B ever did.

I know he was in a concentration camp because the number was very clear on his arm, stark against his white skin every time the weather got hot, and he wore a short sleeve shirt.

I am not saying that the United States created concentration camps. As far as I know, it did not. But the description from the news story is frightening in its familiarity. What if we, the good citizens of the United States, somehow let our government do to Jose Padilla what the Nazis did to Mr. B?

How will we ever make up for that?

A Reaction to Jane Mayer's The Dark Side

By Nancy Jane Moore

I've just finished reading Jane Mayer's detailed and disturbing study of the Bush Administration's torture policies, The Dark Side, and I've got just one thing to say about all the officials who came up with these policies or applied them or sat by and let them take effect:

Prosecute 'em. All of 'em. Indict the CIA agents who handled the "extraordinary renditions" and actually tortured people. Make the people who had prisoners die in their custody explain what happened. Go after the people who let the clearly innocent be locked up and mistreated for years.

But especially investigate the people at the top, the high deputies and assistants who developed the policies, the cabinet members who either kept quiet or signed off on them, the lawyers who wrote top secret memos asserting that torture was legal, the Vice President of the United States.

Speaking as a lawyer, I say particularly go after the lawyers -- David Addington, John Yoo, Jim Haynes, Alberto Gonzales and many others. They swore an oath to uphold the Constitution when they were admitted to the bar. At a minimum, their bar associations should investigate their actions and determine whether they violated their oath and should be disbarred.

I don't just want them prosecuted because the policies as described by Mayer violated the U.S. Constitution, as well as U.S. and international law. I don't even want them prosecuted just because the actions were horrible and immoral. I also want them prosecuted because the actions were absurd and stupid and made the U.S. and the world much less safe while leading us into a disastrous war.

My brother-in-law, who teaches physics, says that he begins each school year by asking his students, "Why do you believe what you believe?" It's his way of introducing them to the scientific method, where you do experiments to find facts, and use those facts to figure out the truth.

The same sort of process should apply in law, particularly in criminal investigations, and also in gathering intelligence for national defense reasons. Get the facts, and then analyze the facts to determine the truth.

Instead Dick Cheney and his henchman Addington decided in advance what the truth was, and limited themselves to facts that supported it. And Bush and all the macho pseudocowboys at all levels of the administration (male and female, according to Mayer) jumped on the bandwagon, talking tough and ignoring any facts that contradicted their worldview.

We must prosecute these people because we need to send a message that the takeover of our government by zealots like Addington will not be tolerated, and that decisionmaking will be done rationally, by examining the facts and figuring out the truth. And we must prosecute them because their actions undermined our national principles and truly threaten the American way of life.

We have to clear the air, to make certain that everyone -- all of us here in the U.S. and the world as a whole -- knows that we do not tolerate these actions. Otherwise, someone else down the road will resurrect them and justify it by citing the Bush years.

We also need to know the facts, as many facts as we can get. A prosecution, after all, if conducted properly, is a way to establish the facts and come at the truth. I am advocating the classic legal process here -- not the kind of persecutions that Mayer documents in her book. A few bad guys will probably slip through the cracks, but with luck we'll nail most of the people responsible for the real harm. And maybe even some of them will be able to defend themselves.

I know it will be expensive, and that Bush is leaving the country in financial tatters on so many fronts. I know we have many other important things to do -- addressing climate change and health care, just to name two crucial things neglected for years -- along with solving the obvious economic and foreign policy problems.

But the Bush approval of torture and all the related horrors goes to the very heart of who we are. Unless we face what these people have done in our name, while so many sat idly by, we will leave a flaw at the heart of our country, one that will come back to haunt us.

[cross posted on Open Salon]

Not a joke & not science fiction: New device disperses crowds by making people feel like their skin is on fire

By Diane Silver

Wired News has turned up something that makes your skin crawl, literally. What's worrying about their report is that they say this new device has just been certified for use in Iraq.

Wired News reports on the device this way.

The crowd is getting ugly. Soldiers roll up in a Hummer. Suddenly, the whole right half of your body is screaming in agony. You feel like you've been dipped in molten lava. You almost faint from shock and pain, but instead you stumble backwards -- and then start running. To your surprise, everyone else is running too. In a few seconds, the street is completely empty.

You've just been hit with a new nonlethal weapon that has been certified for use in Iraq -- even though critics argue there may be unforeseen effects....

The Air Force's Active Denial System, or ADS, has been certified safe after lengthy tests by military scientists in the lab and in war games.

While an effective nonlethal device for dispersing crowds may be a good idea, just the mention of this thing has me worried.

If it works like Wired News reports, doesn't the fact that it inflicts so much pain (even if it doesn't maim or kill) mean that using it is torture? Could this device be used on prisoners to torture them? Would unpopular administrations be tempted to use it to disperse lawful demonstrations in the United States?

The mainstream media seems to have missed this story completely, but if it is true, we need to look at this device closely and consider the implications. Wired News has also posted documents about the Air Force tests on the device.