Amnesty International Panel Discussion with Former Guantanamo Detainee

An exciting and important event in Berkeley this week:

Amnesty International USA would like to invite you to attend an exceptional panel discussion on Torture and Guantanamo Bay.  In recognition of the two years that have passed since the Presidential Order to close Guantanamo, the goal of this event is to bring attention to the human rights violations that have occurred at Guantanamo Bay and to discuss its intended closure.

This expert speakers' panel will feature Omar Deghayes, a former Guantanamo detainee, who will participate via video conference from Brighton, England; Attorney Candace Gorman, whose Civil and Constitutional Rights work has included representing two Guantanamo detainees; and Professor Almerindo Ojeda from the UC Davis Center for the Study of Human Rights in the Americas, which hosts the Guantanamo Testimonials Project.  There will be a short Q&A session after the panel discussion.

The event will be held at the University of California Berkeley on Wednesday, January 26th from 7:30pm - 9:00pm at 2050 Valley Life Sciences Building. 

The event is co-sponsored by the UC Berkeley Human Rights Center, Health Professionals Against Torture, Survivors International, United Nations Association USA East Bay Chapter and the Boalt Alliance Against Torture.  The event is free and open to the public.

For more information about the event please contact William Butkus, Amnesty International Field Organizer wbutkus@aiusa.org or 415-288-1800

Lucky Shoes: R.I.P. Ibrahim Alickovic

Ibrahim Alickovic died March 10, 2008. This gentle, giving man was a survivor of the concentration camps in Bosnia, where he was imprisoned and suffered torture and state terror because he was Muslim and had "attributes of leadership." You can read a moving obituary to him by psychologist Alice Shaw at the Survivors International website. The following poem by Alickovic is taken from the same site.

************
Rahatluk
(Lucky Shoes 43 1/2)
By Ibrahim Alickovic

Contrary
To public opinion
Holding that prison camp is a secular hell
There were--in our camp--
Moments of pure joy.
As one day when
They collected us all in the yard.
Then the command:
Take off your shoes
All you mother-fuckers!

So. We would be barefoot at our own executions.
I trembled, counting time backward
To shorten the time.
The night was quiet.
And full of moonlight.
We fifty-two men without shoes.
There were eighteen of them--with their guns.

Nevertheless, it was not what we thought.
Instead of a shot in the head--
Two big boxes: a gift!
Each of us given a pair of
brand new black shoes.
Each of us equally fit with
the same size: 43 1/2.

Oh! the delight of those new shoes, my God!
Oh! how much more delightful
If some of the shoes had been bigger
Some just a bit smaller--
Still. The pure joy of it!

Catholic Church Bans Anti-Torture Activist

Dr. Steven Miles, the author of Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror, and faculty member at the University of Minnesota's Center for Bioethics, was supposed to speak last Sunday before at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church. The subject was torture and its effects upon society.

Four days before Dr. Miles' talk, it was cancelled. The background to the story, as reported by the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, is that anti-abortion members of the diocese opposed his appearance "since he helped reverse an anti-abortion scare tactic by the Minnesota Department of Health"... thirty years ago! The irony of defending unborn lives, even as a recent poll suggests a majority of U.S. Catholics support torture "sometimes" or "often", was not lost on the Star-Tribune reporter, nor will it be lost on anyone who reads this story.

According to local press coverage, back in 1978:

The department was telling women that abortion increases the risk of breast cancer. There is no established connection between abortion and breast cancer, and that spurious assertion was removed after scientists, including Miles, testified at the Legislature that it had demoralized the health department and "besmirched" (Miles' word) its reputation.

Miles, a geriatrician, has performed no abortions. But when the Catholic Bulletin threatened to publish the names of doctors who provided abortions to indigent women, Miles wrote a letter to the editor asking that he be named, too, since he supported safe, legal and affordable abortion for those who needed them.

(Speaking of respecting life, coincidentally, the same issue of the Star-Tribune has an article describing the death by taser of a young man by the Minnesota State Patrol. The tasering of the victim was grotesquely described as a "nonfactor.")

Dr. Miles will give his talk anyway tomorrow night at 7 p.m. at Carondelet Center, next to the College of Saint Catherine at 1890 Randolph Ave., in St. Paul. He has given the text of his presentation to Stephen Soldz, with permission to "redistribute, download, copy and use this material in any electronic or printed form." The following is the text of his speech, as reproduced at Dr. Soldz's website:

Torture and the Courage to Be Inconvenienced

Steven Miles MD

shmjm@hotmail.com

[I was invited to give this talk at adult education at St. Joan of Arc Catholic Church on May 4, 2008 and lead a discussion of this topic on the evening of May 6. The Archdiocese of Minneapolis and St. Paul informed me that Minnesota Citizens Concerned for Life information@mccl.org encouraged people to contact the diocese to not allow me to speak because I am pro-choice on abortion and pro-euthanasia. Although I am pro-choice on abortion, I have written and spoke against physician-assisted suicide and euthanasia. This talk on torture addresses neither. My wife and I have adopted and raised a disabled foster child. The Archdiocese unications@archspm.org instructed St. Joan's that I could not appear at the adult education in the church. St. Joan arranged for a college venue.

The author hereby grants permission to redistribute, download, copy and use this material in any electronic or printed form. No further permissions need be requested.]
===========

I am deeply honored to be able to speak with you today about the issue of torture.

Torture is not an exotic or esoteric topic. Although we rarely speak of it, it has directly wounded most of us. It is government policy in more than half of the world’s 200 nations. Our relatives fled the torture in East Europe, Latin America, or East Asia. Some of us were dispossessed by torture which enforced United States racial policies. Some of us have lost colleagues to torture in mission. Some of us sent or lost relatives who fought against torturing regimes. Forty thousand families in Minnesota have a torture survivor; we all bear the costs of their diminished parenting abilities, earning power, and sadness.

My family has been touched by torture too. My wife’s ancestors disappeared in the Holocaust of Belarus. Our adoptive son survived the Cambodia’s killing fields and as a nurse put himself in service of the refugees of Ruanda. I have worked with survivors of torture on three continents and assist several groups, including Minnesota’s Center for Victims of Torture, which strives to treat or prevent torture.

=====

The word “torture” comes from the word for “twist” capturing the design of devices like the rack or the wheel that contort the body. We should however not allow our empathic recoil from the image of a person’s agony to cause us to miss the point that torture is aimed to destroy a community. The destruction of a person is the path-the destruction of a community is the goal. The Passion story has all the elements of torture and cruel, inhuman, and degrading treatment.

The ostentatious and unnecessary use of an inside informer,

The mocking purple robe and the public label, “The King of the Jews,”

The scourging and the nails.

Jesus was not some Nazarene carpenter who was picked at random. He was selected and tortured in a manner that was designed to destroy the community carrying His message. In today’s scripture, Jesus reflected on that communitarian nature of his impending arrest and execution,

I glorified You on earth
by accomplishing the work that You gave me to do.
I pray for them. And I have been glorified in them.
And now I will no longer be in the world,
but they are in the world, while I am coming to You.
John 17:1-11a

Torture is generally used to attack and suppress civil society. This is why it is aimed at the monks in Burma, the political leaders of Zimbabwe, the playwrights of Czechoslovakia, the journalists of Russia, the students of Chile, or the union leaders of Uruguay.

In this use, torture is a strategy to maintain

• The corrupt against the civic minded,
  
• The empowered over the disenfranchised, and
  
• The best fed in lands where most are poor and hungry.

Torture is government by intimidation, horror, fear and division. It is antithetical to those who would create societies to flourish by lovingkindness, justice, and inclusion.

=====

In the still space of our confession, we must speak of our active and acquiescent, personal and collective, complicity with the culture of torture.

• We must acknowledge that torture is a problem for all of us. It has found fertile ground in the lands of Islam, on the Buddhist ground of Cambodia’s killing fields, in the fatherland of the Reformation, in the topsoil of communist nations, in the democratic motherlands of Turkey and the United States and in the loam of the Catholic lands of Latin America.
  
  
• We must confess that every people seem capable of torture, even the United States - Convener of the Trials at Nuremburg, co-author of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, and instigator of the Geneva Conventions for the protection against “torture, or cruel or inhuman or degrading treatment.”
  
  
• We should note that the National Catholic Reporter of March 24, 2006 reports that Catholics–more than the public at large, more than Protestants, and more than Evangelicals, support interrogational torture. Secular Americans were most likely to reject interrogational torture.

Then, we must turn from confessing complicity with the culture of torture to the abolition of torture and to reconciliation in societies of justice and lovingkindness.

=====

After the crucifixion, Jesus’ community-the real target of His torture–gathered at Olivet.

All these devoted themselves with one accord to prayer, Acts 1:12-14

They reaffirmed their faith in the message, the movement, and the kind of civil society that had been entrusted to them.

Whoever is made to suffer as a Christian should not be ashamed,
but should glorify God because of the name. 1 Pt 4:13-16

Reconciliation means accepting our responsibility for building a culture against torture.

We are responsible for knowing the facts. Research by the CIA, the Army, and the National Defense Intelligence University all show that interrogational torture is ineffective. It does not defuse ticking time bombs. The television show “24″ lies. Torture:

• Produces bad information that leads to bad policy and needless dangerous battlefield sorties.
  
• Radicalizes survivors
  
• Makes it impossible to recruit human intelligence.
  
• Alienates populations.
  
• Causes an enemy to fight to the death rather than to surrender.
  
• Undercuts the possibility of appealing for the humane treatment of our own soldiers who are taken POW.

We are responsible for resisting the culture of torture.

• Bishop Tutu and Nelson Mandela were freed by our solidarity with their cause.
  
• Our amens enabled Martin Luther King to beat back the culture of Jim Crow.
  
• Our complacency allowed Major Roberto D’Aubuisson to assassinate Archbishop Romero and his forces to oversee the defiling and murder of the Maryknoll sisters.
  
• Our complacency allowed the sadistic guards at Abu Ghraib to go about their business; but our unwillingness to put their photographs aside saved countless lives.

Oona Hathaway, a law professor at Yale University studied 160 nations some of which torture and others of which do not. She found that the witness of the Mothers of the Plaza in Argentina, the honesty of the Chilean Medical Association, or the dignified protests of the lawyers of Pakistan summoned nations towards curbing the scourge of torture.

In such facts and examples, we can discern the path of reconciliation.

We must summon the courage to be inconvenienced by the culture of torture.

We must accept responsibility for rejecting the culture of torture in our personal and collective actions, including our acts of citizenship.

We must lift our voices and hands in solidarity with civil communities of justice and lovingkindness in order to move from confession to the abolition of torture.

Dr. Miles will also be lecturing this May 10 at a fundraiser for the torture treatment center, Survivors International. He will speak on Torture and Ill Treatment: Ethical Responsibilities of Healthcare Providers at the ACLU offices in San Franciso. For more information, or to register, contact Survivors International via email, mkerchner@survivorsintl.org, or call (415)546-2080.

A Real Mensch Leaves APA

Uwe Jacobs is the clinical director of Survivors International in San Francisco, California. SI is regional torture treatment center, and one of the best in the country. A typical non-profit struggling to survive itself in a hostile political and economic environment, Dr. Jacobs work and dedication is one of the main reasons it still exists and thrives.

Dr. Jacobs is a clinical psychologist, and an eminent member of the profession. He has been prominent in the struggle against torture, and in particular against participation by medical and mental health professionals in U.S. coercive interrogations at Guantanamo and elsewhere.

He's done more than speak. Dr. Jacobs assisted in the preparation of the currently existing international guidelines for the examination of torture, the "Istanbul Protocol," published by the UN High Commissioner. He also took a major role in helping write the handbook on assessment of asylum seekers for Physicians for Human Rights. He has spoken on the torture issue from both a political and a treatment perspective. A really unique individual.

You would think any psychological organization worth its salt would be proud to have him as an exemplary member. But the tawdry organizational and political activities of the American Psychological Association around the torture issue have driven many to withhold their dues from that organization, or to quit. Now Dr. Jacobs joins those who have left the organization.

What follows is his letter of resignation to APA, posted here with permission, as originally posted at Psyche, Science and Society.

Farewell to the APA

After a couple of years of struggling with the leadership of the American Psychological Association over the issue of its complicity with the governments torture politics, I have decided to leave the APA for now. As the latest resolution against torture was passed by the APA Council this summer, there was on one side the appearance of a compromise between different factions within the organization and an outcome that received sufficient praise for it to pass as an honest human rights effort in public opinion. On the other side, there was my private sense of resignation and queasiness over the dirty pool that had been played. Much could be said about all that but suffice it to summarize the deciding moment, which came when I learned from an article in Salon that Dr. Stephen Behnke, the Director of the Ethics Office, ”insisted on Saturday that Physicians for Human Rights had suggested some qualifying language with respect to sleep and sensory deprivation.”

Since those of us who were involved in the process knew that Len Rubenstein of PHR had, in fact, pleaded with Behnke in a series of letters to drop the language in question, not to retain it, I asked for clarification. Rather than making a claim of misunderstanding, Dr. Behnke did not even deny having made that statement to Salon. However, nobody missed a beat in the aftermath and everyone prepared for their next statement or press release. The show, or as Robin Williams would have it, the hoe, must go on.

I conclude, at least for now, that the APA (and yes, I still think we ought to use an article in front of saying or writing "APA") is not a club I care to belong to, not because any majority of it, or even some of its obnoxious leadership, would actively push the use of torture but because its essential character as a careerist, corporate structure does not seem to promote telling the truth and carrying forward an upright posture. I have never shared the belief of some members that APA leaders had a primary interest in promulgating either torture or lesser forms of prisoner oppression. Being blissfully ignorant of how many APA functionaries are involved with the CIA and how many psychologists actively implement and support a regime of sensory deprivation and other forms of cruelty, I have felt that the primary motivation has been to appear as stalwart supporters of the military apparatus, as long as it would curry favor with the regime that might or might not trade a good horse for it. I am allowing for the possibility that it may be worse than that but I simply do not know.

Be that as it may, the APA's alignment with Washington politics is quite likely preparing for the end of the Bush era and getting ready to become more pleasing to its liberal wing before long. The many excellent people I had the privilege of working with during this time certainly deserve that and I salute them all, as it were, for staying on and keeping the faith. I am not excluding the possibility of re-joining them if things change more than I expect they will. I could withhold my APA dues, along with others, but I do not honestly see the precise conditions under which I would subsequently release them. I simply will not let the APA have any more of my money. In the interest of full disclosure, I might not even care quite that much if the dues weren’t so high and if top APA employees weren’t being paid corporate-style salaries. Given that fact, however, I am past due in firing them for their performance. For this year, I will donate the amount of my APA dues to PHR, an organization I have been proudly associated with for long time (but, unlike SI, does not issue my paycheck), and I will do that with pleasure, rather than regrets.

Uwe Jacobs, Ph.D.
San Francisco, December 4, 2007

Uwe, whom I consider both a friend and a colleague, will go on, I know, continuing to do his important work, and fighting against the attitudes and institutions that support or try to minimize the use of torture and inhumane treatment. That he will do so from the outside of an organization like APA is no loss to him, but only to APA, and a reflection on its moral and political bankruptcy.

Historian Alfred McCoy Speaks on U.S. Torture Program

Alfred McCoy, a professor of history at University of Wisconsin, Madison, and author of A Question of Torture: CIA Interrogation, from the Cold War to the War on Terror, spoke on the history of torture at The Wright Institute in Berkeley, CA on March 10, 2007. The event was co-sponsored by Survivors International, a torture treatment center in San Francisco.

Also invited to the event, and formally participating in the discussion in the second half, was Stephen Behnke, Director of the Ethics Office for the American Psychological Association (APA). Behnke has garnered a reputation as an apologist-defender of the official APA position on psychologist participation in national security interrogations. As I've written elsewhere, the APA defends using psychologists in "war on terror" torture interrogations (of course, they deny the "torture" part), which include the use of sensory deprivation, isolation, induction of fear, humiliation, sleep deprivation, and manipulation of temperature, time, light, etc., among other abusive practices.

In his presentation, Professor Mc Coy concentrated on research he has conducted that implicates major figures in the history of medicine and psychology in the research program undertaken by British, Canadian, and U.S. militaries and secret services on mind control and torture interrogation. He also discussed the development of so-called ethics policies as they intersect this history. His entire lecture, as well as much of the discussion, has been posted via YouTube on a webpage at Survivors Internation. It is comprehensive in scope and riveting to watch. I highly recommend viewing the entire thing.

According to Stephen Soldz, an APA opponent of torture collaboration who is helping lead the fight against the APA leadership on this question, Dr. Behnke has refused to allow any video of his participation to be posted. This is in line with the secrecy with which the APA has generally opposed openness on questions of APA decision-making, choosing to make certain things public, and hide others as it sees fit.

Along these lines, during the discussion period, I asked Dr. Behnke if he would support a call for the U.S. to declassify all materials related to research on interrogations and torture that was conducted during the 1950s and 1960s. I emphasized that psychological knowledge itself is eviscerated by withholding the results of research into coercive interrogations, making it difficult to ascertain just what effects various forms of interrogation have on individuals. It also hides the history of a major project in American medicine, psychiatry and psychology from the American people, not to mention non-military researchers. -- Dr. Behnke never addressed my question.

I cannot overemphasize the importance of Professor McCoy's presentation. This is the history that we must know, that we need to know. The leadership of American medicine and psychology, and a good portion of academia, was purchased, and mostly willingly collaborated, for a period of 20 years or more in a scientific program aimed at destroying human minds and controlling human behavior -- even to the point of inducing individuals to betray their beliefs, their friends, their countries, even to commit murder. We don't know how many thousands of people were destroyed by this inhuman, Nazi-like program. We do know that the technques developed are being used today in the U.S.-run prisons holding "enemy combatants" in Iraq, at the Guantanamo Naval Base, in "black prisons" in secret locations, and even in the U.S. -- most recently at the the Naval Consoldidated Brig in Charleston, South Carolina, where Jose Padilla was tortured.

The fight against torture is a litmus test for progressive forces that would fight the reactionary slide into barbarism and aggressive war, as prosecuted by the Bush Administration, and only mildly opposed by their Democratic opponents. We are failing to meet this litmus test, as the issue is blanketed by others that do not challenge the central entitlements granted to itself by the military-industrial state, that do not challenge its power to destroy any individual it wants. Even the tools whereby they do this are to be kept secret.

After you've watched McCoy's presentation, you might want to donate some money to those who work with the tortured, like Survivors International, those who fight U.S. torture policies, like Physicians for Human Rights, and those who bring the issues around torture to the Internet on a daily basis, like NeverInOurNames.com.

For those who would rather read, don't miss McCoy's excellent 2004 essay, The Long Shadow of CIA Torture Research.