Secretary of Defense Leon Panetta told a reporter from the National Journal Thursday that the Pentagon has for “a long time” been preparing an array of military options for striking Iran if diplomatic and economic sanctions fail to stop what is widely but not universally viewed as that nation making progress toward building a nuclear weapon. Such preparations should be no surprise. The Pentagon develops contingency plans for a variety of actions that never take place.
Tehran has for years adamantly denied that it intends to build a nuke and no one has shown hard evidence that it is doing so. But its past behavior in this regard, having concealed previous work, has led to suspicions that it is still engaged in some level of concealment even now.
Foes of attacking Iran range from those who say that that nation is not building a bomb to those, such as former national intelligence officer Paul Pillar, who say it shouldn’t come under fire even if it does.
Whether the saber-rattling will actually lead to an outright attack is anybody’s guess. Speculation about attacks from Israel or the United States being imminent have been going around for a decade.
In the interview, Panetta said he didn’t believe Israeli leaders had made up their minds about whether to order a high-risk raid against Iran’s nuclear facilities. Panetta, President Obama, and an array of other senior U.S. military and civilian officials have counseled Israel to give the sanctions more time to work before resorting to military force. They’ve also warned that an attack would set Iran’s nuclear program back only by a few years, a high price to pay for the inevitably violent Iranian retaliation likely to follow. [...]
Panetta said in the interview that a unilateral Israeli strike against Iran would be less effective than one conducted by the U.S., which has a significantly larger air force and an array of advanced weapons more powerful than any possessed by the Jewish state. [...]
“If they decided to do it there’s no question that it would have an impact, but I think it’s also clear that if the United States did it we would have a hell of a bigger impact,” Panetta said in the interview.[...]
Panetta’s remarks echoed his tough talk on Iran earlier this week. Speaking to a powerful pro-Israel lobby on Tuesday, Panetta said that “if all else fails, we will act” to prevent Iran from obtaining nuclear weapons.
“Let me be clear—we do not have a policy of containment,” he told the crowd. “We have a policy of preventing Iran from acquiring nuclear weapons.”
Today is International Women’s Day, and women’s peace groups around the world are issuing backgrounders and statements galore; in particular they are drawing attention to the very important issue of the decline of rights and security for women in Iraq since the US “liberation.”
[I've gotten four different ones in my inbox already.] One of the best ones I’ve seen came from Madre, and since this is a resource we don’t see cited very often in dKos land, I thought it might be worthwhile to pass it on.
Before you start to complain that security isn’t a woman’s issue per se, it might be helpful to remember that when social structures break down, it is women (and the weaker in society) who bear, in particular ways, the burdens that arise from that collapse. Thus these issues offer a good indicator of “bigger picture” state security questions.
Women: the canaries in the proverbial national security coal mine.
If only Obama were white & had stuffed a dead deer head into Derrick Bell’s mailbox, he wouldn’t have this problem today #BreitbartHasTape — @JC_Christian via Tweed webOS
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In my article at Truthout the other day on the death of two of the purported suicides at Guantanamo, Abdul Rahman Al Amri in May 2007 and Mohammad Ahmed Abdullah Saleh Al Hanashi in June 2009, I described in great detail the circumstances surrounding both deaths. The story was based on the recent declassified autopsies of the two men.
Al Amri was discovered hanging in his cell. Reportedly, his hands had been loosely tied behind his back. I criticized the Department of Defense for not following forensic SOP and considering homicide as a possibility in his death.
In Al Hanashi’s death, a more solid case of suicide was present, although there were a number of discrepanies: his ligature is said at one point to be twisted on the right side of his neck, another time on the left side; the “elastic band” from his “brief” (supposedly used to kill himself) does not match the type of underwear in use at Guantanamo at this time; the timeline leaves unexplained why he was not on suicide watch after multiple recent attempts, or why there was a large gap in time that he was not observed, contrary to SOP procedures.
The discrepancies have led me to believe the most likely cause of Al Hanashi’s death was faciliated suicide. All the available data now argues that camp guards and/or prison health officials, with or without the connivance of camp leadership, very likely provided the very mentally ill Al Hanashi with the means and the available time to kill himself.
Possible reasons were explored in the Truthout article. I will add that’s it’s possible that prison hospital officials had simply tired of Al Hanashi’s chronic suicidality and self-mutilation (he had been consistently banging his head on the prison camps walls), and decided to let him die (criminal neglect) or facilitated his death by the proffer of materials and opportunity to make the fatal attempt.
Such facilitated suicide amounts to murder, and it is not unprecedented. Indeed, an article from 2009 describes just such a prison “suicide,” arranged by prison personnel in the case of Matthew Bullock, a prisoner at the State Correctional Institution at Dallas, Texas.
Bret Grote, an investigator with the chapter, said credible prisoners who were confined in cells near Bullock contacted the organization claiming that Bullock, though a known suicide risk, was moved from a video-equipped cell to one without monitoring capabilities.
And on the morning of the suicide, two guards at the Jackson Township facility had been kicking on Bullock’s cell door, saying, “Kill yourself, you little p****,” according to one prisoner report, Grote said.
Prisoners also reported to Fed Up! that prison staff failed to place Bullock on suicide monitoring watch after Bullock stated his intention to kill himself. Hours later, Bullock was found by guards on the next shift hanging dead from his cell door, Grote said.
According to one description, “facilitated suicide” “occurs because of CLINICIAN indifference.” But as in the case of Bullock and most likely Al Hanashi, the actions can be even more active than the mere withdrawal of necessary care.
Both the deaths of Al Amri and Al Hanashi call out for an independent investigation. But it’s unlikely anything approaching that will occur. The main reason is the indifference of the American public to the crimes that took place and still take place at the US gulag-style prison. The primary cause for such indifference is the subordination of American liberals to the electoral needs of presidential politics. With the looming election between Barack Obama and some GOP challenger, the fate of those in a prison where Obama has put his stamp of approval over the indefinite detention of the prisoners is a matter of no account to those who see in the election of a Democratic president the overarching goal of their political lives.
In addition, Obama has told his followers that they must “not look back” at the crimes that took place under the Bush administration, and that includes the torture of “war on terror” prisoners. But Al Hanashi died on Obama’s watch. It’s not about a failure of accountability over the past any more, but about burying a moral imperative against torture and murder so your candidate can be elected.
The failure to address the truth about the deaths of Al Amri and Al Hanashi, and the fate of the other Guantanamo detainees, may not be the worst capitulation the American political and journalist class (with a few notable exceptions) has committed, but it certainly will go down as one of the most despicable and cowardly.
Taking direct aim at Mitt Romney and Republican lawmakers, this week President Obama speaks about the turnaround in the U.S. auto industry:
Just a few years ago, their industry was shedding hundreds of thousands of jobs. Two of the Big Three – GM and Chrysler – were on the brink of failure. If we had let this great American industry collapse – if we had let Detroit go bankrupt – more than one million Americans would have lost their jobs in the middle of the worst recession since the Great Depression.
I refused to let that happen … So in exchange for help, we demanded responsibility. We got the companies to retool and restructure. Everyone sacrificed. And three years later, the American auto industry is back.
… points out our increasing energy production that Republicans either ignore or flat-out lie about on a daily basis:
Six years ago, 60% of the oil we used was imported. Since I took office, America’s dependence on foreign oil has decreased every single year. In fact, in 2010, for the first time in thirteen years, less than half the petroleum we consumed was imported. Part of that is because we’re producing more oil here at home than at any time in the last eight years.
… and again calls for ending subsidies to Big Oil:
Here’s one we can make right now. Every year, billion of your tax dollars go to subsidizing the oil industry. These are the same companies making record profits – tens of billions of dollars a year. I don’t think oil companies need more corporate welfare. Congress should end this taxpayer giveaway. If you agree with me, I’m asking you to e-mail, call, or Tweet your representative. Tell them to stop fighting for oil companies. Tell them to start fighting for working families. Tell them to fight for the clean energy future that’s within our reach.
So, call or write your congressman or senator and tell them to end the giveaway to Big Oil.
N.C. Rep. George Cleveland thinks
poverty is a government plot
State Rep. George Cleveland, a four-term Republican who represents Onslow County in the North Carolina General Assembly, said with a straight face at a hearing Thursday: “We have no one in the state of North Carolina living in extreme poverty. We might governmentally say they are, but we don’t. … They keep redefining poverty to make sure we have a poverty class.”
Noxious nonsense that landed him a coveted spot on Keith Olbermann’s Worst Persons in the World list. Tazra Mitchell at North Carolina’s Progressive Pulse blog noted just how off-the-wall Cleveland is:
According to the latest United States Census data, 17.4 percent of North Carolinians lived below the federal poverty line in 2010. This stingy threshold was set at ,314 for a family of four in 2010. Even more disturbing are the 728,842 North Carolinians who lived in deep poverty—which equates to an annual income of roughly ,100 for a family of four. In fact, the deep poverty rate for North Carolina is a full percentage point above the national rate of 6.8 percent. There are only 9 states with a higher deep poverty rate than North Carolina’s deep poverty rate.
Worse, 1 in 4 children in North Carolina lived in poverty in 2010. The numbers are higher for African American, Latino, and American Indian children, 40.2 percent, 42.6 percent, and 37.9 percent respectively, compared to 14 percent for white children. What about the children living in deep poverty? There are 258,770 of them, which brings North Carolina’s child deep poverty rate to 11.5 percent. Of the children living in deep poverty, 13.8 percent of them are under the age of 6.
The state NAACP and another Pulse blogger, Rob Schofield, recommended that Cleveland join the North Carolina Justice Center’s Truth and Hope Tour of Poverty in the state.
But it seems unlikely he’d learn much from it. Schofield wrote that Cleveland previously has said that an undocumented immigrant could be readily identified if he has “a pair of shaggy boots on, and jeans and a t-shirt, and he’s got a straw hat on.”
By the way, that hearing, Adam Peck points out, was of the House Select Committee on Early Childhood Education Development. Its latest report recommends drastically reducing the number of children eligible for pre-kindergarten education in the state. Those most likely to get booted? Children of families in the deep poverty Cleveland says doesn’t exist.
Full text of Democratic presidential candidate Sen. John F. Kennedy’s famed speech pleading for religious tolerance and reiterating his unconditional support for separation of church and state. About.com US Liberal Politics: Most Popular Articles
Last month, members of the American Psychological Association announced a “new APA members-initiated Task Force to reconcile policies related to psychologists’ involvement in national security settings.” The movement for a new task force to ostensibly replace the 2005 task force on “Psychological Ethics and National Security” (PENS), which in the midst of the controversies surrounding use of torture at Guantanamo and other US torture prison sites, validated the use of psychologists at such sites (even as psychologists were implicated in the torture), comes at a time when a strong movement for annulment of the PENS report is underway.
This new “APA members-initiated” proposal is spear-headed by Linda Woolf, the task force chair, and Ellen Garrison, APA’s Senior Policy advisor and “staff liaison” for the task force. None of the supporters of the successful 2008 APA member referendum to end psychologist participation at national security sites that fail to meet international human rights standards have been asked to participate on the new “task force.” Other task force members include psychologists Laura Brown, Kathleen Dockett, Julie Meranze Levitt, and Bill Strickland.
As Coalition for an Ethical Psychology note in their statement reproduced below, three of the five current task force members actually opposed that referendum, which was passed with nearly 60& of the vote. The referendum has never been operationally instituted by APA, which has failed to date to ever state its opposition, for instance, to the presence of psychologists at Guantanamo, a US national security setting long held to be out of compliance with international human rights standards.
But the facilitators of US torture at APA (despite their verbiage to the contrary) must never read articles like this one from only last month:
(Reuters) – The United States is still flouting international law at Guantanamo Bay, despite President Barack Obama’s election pledge to shut the facility, the United Nations human rights chief Navi Pillay said on Monday.
“It is ten years since the U.S. Government opened the prison at Guantanamo, and now three years since 22 January 2009, when the President ordered its closure within twelve months. Yet the facility continues to exist and individuals remain arbitrarily detained – indefinitely – in clear breach of international law,” Pillay said in a statement.
The PENS report was fatally compromised by the overwhelming presence of national security/military psychologists. The new “task force” may be slightly differently constituted, as it is heavily loaded with members from APA’s Division 48, the Society for the Study of Peace, Conflict, and Violence. But then, we have been living in an Orwellian world for decades now, and it’s unlikely the new composition will fool very many people. Div. 48 is well-known for having as a group having opposed the 2008 referendum.
Task force member Dr. Stickland, from APA’s Division 19, the Society for Military Psychology, is also the president of The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO). As Bryant Welch, himself a former APA official pointed out in an article at Huffington Post, “Today, fifty-five percent of HumRRO’s budget comes from the military”:
In 1951 the military established The Human Resource Research Organization (HumRRO) to develop techniques for “psychological warfare.” HumRRO was run by psychologist Dr. Meredith Crawford who spent ten years as APA treasurer and was deeply involved in APA activities for three decades. Crawford’s former student, Raymond Fowler, became Chief Executive Officer of APA in 1989 and stayed in that position until 2003…. The current President of HumRRO, psychologist William Strickland, has been an outspoken supporter of APA’s policies on the torture issue. He served on the APA Council of Representatives throughout the APA deliberations on torture.
And so it goes.
The following is a statement (PDF) by the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, which has been spearheading the drive to annul the PENS report. (The original statement announcing the new APA “grassroots task force,” can be found here.)
Coalition Rejects New “Task Force”
With the support of the Board and Administration of the American Psychological Association (APA), a self-appointed group of APA members has just announced the creation of a “Task Force to Reconcile Policies Related to Psychologists’ Involvement in National Security Settings.” Superficially, the formation of this task force appears to be a step forward in addressing critical issues of human rights and professional ethics. But the Coalition for an Ethical Psychology, referenced in the task force’s announcement, opposes this initiative for many reasons. Our call for annulment of the deeply flawed PENS Report has gained broad support. Yet this new task force attempts to redefine priorities and deflect attention away from this urgent issue, asserting that “the PENS report offers unique contributions to APA policy” which need to be integrated into a “unified, comprehensive APA policy.” As such, this task force is primarily an “anti-annulment” initiative. If successful, its agenda will further enshrine PENS policies – policies that were adopted through a fundamentally unethical process and that resulted in grievous harm and the tarnishing of our profession.
Any attempt to clarify possible ambiguities in APA’s statements and resolutions bearing on torture and cruel, inhuman, or degrading treatment should be postponed until after the PENS Report has been officially annulled. Otherwise, from the outset the presumption will be that it is ethically permissible for psychologists to serve in aggressive operational psychology[1] roles, including consultation to interrogators of national security detainees. Yet a crucial question has never received broad and open discussion: Should psychologists serve in combatant and aggressive operational capacities in military/intelligence settings where our foundational “do no harm” ethical principle is subservient to military policy? The new task force states that it will not develop any new policy. Their initiative will merely delay these much needed deliberations and possible reform.
The Coalition is also concerned about the composition of the new task force. None of its five members actively supported – and at least three actively opposed – the 2008 member-initiated Referendum prohibiting psychologists from working in national security settings that violate human rights. This Referendum was overwhelmingly endorsed by 59% of voting APA members. Moreover, several members of this task force have been vehement opponents over the past several years of most attempts to change APA policies on interrogations. The three task force members from the Peace Psychology Division (Division 48) have taken this action without any discussion with the division membership, and despite the fact that the Executive Committee officially endorsed the annulment petition two months ago.
Returning to the key issue of annulment, when reports first surfaced that psychologists were aiding and even implementing U.S. programs of torture and abuse in national security settings, the APA turned its ethics process in this domain over to the military–intelligence establishment. The resulting 2005 PENS Task Force had six of nine voting members from that area, including several members who served in chains of command publicly accused of abuses at that time. The three voting members of the PENS Task Force without military ties have all subsequently renounced the report, and two of them have denounced the process as corrupt from the start. Military-intelligence advisors who analyzed the PENS process identified it as “a social legitimization process for a decision made at higher levels of the DoD.”
While stating that psychologists should not participate in abuses, the PENS Report gives the imprimatur of the APA to psychologists serving in detention and other national security operations where their activities are protected by secrecy and information is classified. The Report also reiterates the primacy of U.S. law and military regulations over professional ethics. These two assertions were all that the military and CIA needed from the PENS Task Force and PENS Report. In important ways, the remainder of the Report simply serves to obscure the importance of these two profoundly problematic conclusions.[2]
Thus far, the Coalition’s petition calling for annulment of the PENS Report has been endorsed by 33 groups and organizations – including nine within APA itself – and by over 1,800 individuals. The full list is available online at www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens. Annulment is needed in order to (1) renounce the illegitimate process that enabled the military-intelligence establishment to control our profession’s ethics, and (2) move the profession to engage in a thorough and independent review of the ethics of psychologists participating in various national security activities. For the reasons we have summarized here, we strongly believe that this new task force will stand in the way of annulment. Indeed, its formation is reminiscent of the back-room deals of the PENS process itself. We also believe that the narrow interests currently dominating the APA’s agenda in this area must no longer supersede the ethical commitments and aspirations of the association’s membership and of psychologists outside the APA. The profession’s future depends on what we do now.
We therefore encourage psychologists to reject this new task force initiative, and to communicate your opposition to APA leaders, including Board members, Council members, and division officers. At the same time, we encourage you to visit the Coalition website, to review our materials on annulment of the PENS Report and, if you have not already done so, to sign our petition (www.ethicalpsychology.org/pens).
February 23, 2012
[1] Operational psychologists, who are licensed clinical psychologists, are purportedly using psychology to further military/intelligence operations, as in interrogation support. We distinguish between traditional operational psychology roles (e.g., personnel selection) and aggressive operational psychology, where psychologists are duty-bound to put the mission first and where military regulations and orders supersede the ethical standards of their profession. Further, they often work in classified settings, which severely impedes effective ethical monitoring as they and their employer can deny ethics committees access to the information necessary to adjudicate cases. [2] Further details about the illegitimacy of the PENS process and PENS Report are documented here: http://www.ethicalpsychology.org/materials/PENS_Annulment_Background_Statement.pdf.
I’m Mitt Romney. And I’ll keep on cutting my taxes until I run out of fingers. (Brian Synder/Reuters)
Nothing says “desperate loser seeking seal of approval from right-wingers” than proposing yet another tax cut for the wealthy in a last minute Hail Mary:
Team Romney tells me there will be a bolder tax-cut plan released either at the debate tomorrow night (if Mitt gets it in) or more formally at his Detroit Economic Club speech on Friday. I’m embargoed from releasing details until tomorrow. But I can say that the new plan will be across-the-board with supply-side incentives from rate reduction, and that it will help small-business owners as well as everyone else.
What a creative idea! No Republican has ever done anything like this before, right? I mean, I can hardly wait to find out how low Mitt Romney thinks his taxes should go!
President John F. Kennedy greets wellwishers during a ceremony at the White House. President Kennedy was unusually admired by the American public, particularly by young people. About.com US Liberal Politics: Most Popular Articles
If only Obama were white & had stuffed a dead deer head into Derrick Bell’s mailbox, he wouldn’t have this problem today #BreitbartHasTape
Wednesday night, the 