http://www.democracynow.org/article.pl?sid=07/06/01/1457247

Friday, June 1st, 2007

. . . The Pentagon has just declassified a report from their Inspector General looking at the various investigations they conducted into repeated claims of prisoner abuse by the US military.

The report finds that the abuse allegations "were not consistently reported, investigated, or managed in an effective, systematic, and timely manner."

But perhaps the most important information in the report is that it provides further documentation that psychologists played a role in military interrogations.

In particular, the Pentagon Inspector General provides concrete evidence that techniques developed by the US military for withstanding torture are being used against prisoners at Guantanamo Bay.

After 9/11, the Pentagon began using so-called behavioral science consultants, or "biscuit" teams, to advise the military on how to "break" prisoners to make them more cooperative.

The biscuit teams were advised by psychologists and medical staff versed in techniques employed at a Pentagon-funded program known as SERE, or "Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape."

SERE was created by the Air Force to teach pilots and other personnel considered at high risk of being captured by enemy forces how to withstand and resist extreme forms of abuse.

The interrogation techniques devised at Guantanamo with the help of the Biscuit teams eventually migrated to Abu Ghraib and other Iraqi prisons . . .

Dr. Leonard Rubenstein, Executive Director of Physicians for Human Rights:

There is an obligation of psychologists to do no harm.

It’s no different than the obligations physicians have. And what happened, I think, is that these individuals saw themselves as behavioral scientists, not as clinicians, not subject to those kinds of ethical constraints.

And the irony, of course, the paradox, is there was nothing scientific about what happened in SERE at all.

There was no scientific basis for the idea that these techniques could get good information, even putting aside the fact that it amounts to torture.

But there was no science behind it . . .

- - Leonard Rubenstein

- - "Democracy Now!" - - Friday, June 1, 2007

Biscuit teams.

Sounds so sweet.

upthread at 9:15 am. Of course I didn't agree that the terrorists are targeting freedom itself (since the USA isn't exactly number one on the current lists at Freedom House), but I thought that Bush's praising human rights and civil liberties, here and abroad, just after 9/11, was a fine thing.

And it'd be even better if Bush were doing the hard work of actually living up to those fine words.

All in all, I may have said more nice things about Bush than shooter242 ever has. Shooter242 claims to be a Bush supporter, but do you ever see him saying how Bush did something right?

That was bait.

It won't work.

Praising GWB isn't shooter242's purpose, so he's not gonna let me trick him into doing it.

As Roy Edroso wrote, a couple of days ago, we should keep trying to have a Bill of Rights to be hypocritical about.

http://washingtonlife.com/issues/holiday-2006/2007-social-list

It's not exactly 400 names, but it's close enough.

O. Henry wrote:

Not very long ago some one invented the assertion that there were only "Four Hundred" people in New York City who were really worth noticing.

But a wiser man has arisen--the census taker--and his larger estimate of human interest has been preferred in marking out the field of these little stories of the "Four Million."

- - O. Henry, Introduction to "The Four Million" (1906)

Shooter242 doesn't say what he think America's role in the world should be, but he does say that the role shouldn't involve having any overseas military bases:

We have troops in 130 countries, it's time to bring them home.
- - shooter242 - - Sunday, June 3, 2007 10:09 AM

The Administration takes a less extreme position.

http://newsmax.com/archives/articles/2004/9/23/95826.shtml

U.S. to Close 35 Percent of Overseas Bases
NewsMax.com
Thursday, Sept. 23, 2004

WASHINGTON – Over the next decade, the military will abandon 35 percent of the Cold War-era bases and buildings it uses abroad, even as it seeks to expand a network of bare-bones sites in Asia, Africa, the Middle East and Eastern Europe to help fight terrorism.

Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld was outlining the plan Thursday to the Senate Armed Services Committee.

In a report to Congress, the Pentagon offered details of the "global defense posture." The planned changes, once completed, will result in "the most profound reordering" of U.S. military forces overseas since the current global arrangements were set 50 years ago, according to the report.

Most Americans are unaware that we maintain military installations at over 800 different overseas locations.

Most Americans would probably guess that some of those overseas bases could be closed without endangering America. Indeed, various Pentagon agencies and task forces (BRAC/OSBC/QDR/GPR/IGPBS/etc.) would confirm that guess.

More importantly, there are some overseas bases whose existence actually decreases national security.

So, how many overseas bases are useless, or worse than useless, and should be closed?

Perhaps as many closings as were planned by the Bush-Cheney-Rumsfeld administration in 2004.

Perhaps even more closings than that.

This is related to major policy questions which receive far too little attention. In fact, various Pentagon agencies have complained, for years, that Congress performs insufficient oversight on these questions, since the questions aren't just about how to perform various missions, but about what those missions should be, and those aren't proper questions to simply be left to the Pentagon.