pentagon - Quaker Ranter

The long life of 1950s sci-fi

Martin Kelley — Wed, 02 Jul 2008 01:59:18 +0000

Part of the playbook for American torture in Iraq and Guantánamo comes from Chinese interrogation methods used against captured Americans during the Cold War.

What the trainers did not say, and may not have known, was that their chart had been copied verbatim from a 1957 Air Force study of Chinese Communist techniques used during the Korean War to obtain confessions, many of them false, from American prisoners.
The recycled chart is the latest and most vivid evidence of the way Communist interrogation methods that the United States long described as torture became the basis for interrogations both by the military at the base at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, and by the Central Intelligence Agency.

It sounds like something out of the 1962 thriller film The Manchurian Candidate. And in a way it is: the idea that Chinese Communists had used inhuman ruthlessness to unlock the secrets of the brain to create the perfect truth technique would be a charming artifact of 1950s American culture, something to show alongside the hula hoop and the Jetson-like hover cars we’re all supposed to be driving in the year 2000. Instead it’s yet another exhibit in Pentagon amnesia.

Doesn’t anyone do any fact checking at the Pentagon? “Officials who drew on the SERE program [in 2002 to design American intelligence adaptation] appear to have been unaware that it had been created as a result of concern about false confessions by American prisoners.” And yet… it’s clear that Presidents Bush and Cheney wanted false information in 2002 to launch the war against Iraq. Whatever “confessions” can be wrung from the Baghdad taxi drivers who got caught up in the arrest sweeps can certainly be used to bully the growing number who oppose the war.

But what do we want, justifications or the truth? Peace in the region or protection from sins of the past? Forget that torture is inhuman: it’s also just an unreliable way of getting accurate information. It’s hard to imagine a realistic scenario where the horrible events of 9/11 could have been stopped by acts of torture by U.S. intelligence or military personnel but it’s could have been stopped if thoughtful analysts had been allowed to share information across agency lines and been focused on true knowledge and understanding.

Pass the hummus, please, and by the way: are you a fed?

Martin Kelley — Thu, 22 Dec 2005 19:33:34 +0000

It seems that every day brings new revelations from mainstream media about governmental spying on Americans.

MS-NBC started the ball rolling on the 14th when they informed us that the Pentagon had a database of “protesters including the Raging Grannies and a dozen or so Quakers in Florida”:http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/10454316. This must have prompted the New York Times to publish a story they had been sitting on for a year: the scoop that Bush had ordered the super-secret “National Security Agency to start evesdropping on Americans”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/15/politics/15cnd-program.html following the 9/11 terror attacks. It’s revelation was an FBI agent’s email complaining about “radical militant librarians [who] kick us around”:http://www.ala.org/al_onlineTemplate.cfm?Section=alonline&template=/ContentManagement/ContentDisplay.cfm&ContentID=111469. Two days later we received the almost-humorous news that the Department of Homeland Security was hard at work monitoring the “Massachusett’s inter-library loan system “:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12 [UPDATE: this has been “revealed to be a hoax”:http://www.southcoasttoday.com/daily/12–05/12–24-05/a01lo719.htm by the student]. Trying to outdo the DHS in ridiculous, we learned on the 20th that “the FBI has been infiltrating vegan potlucks”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/20/politics/20fbi.html. Today it turns out the “New York City Police Department”:http://www.nytimes.com/2005/12/22/nyregion/22police.html has been doing its own extensive investigations into protesters. They even apparently staged mock arrests in an attempt to incite violence (their contribution to the self-parody has been to send officers undercover on bicycle protests).

Are we surprised by all this? Well, not really. The fears unleashed after 9/11 ignited a firestorm of paranoia in the ranks of spydom. Nonviolence.org got a call from the U.S. Secret Service when Osama bin Laden posted to the board that he wanted to kill President Bush (well, actually we’re pretty certain it was a acne-faced fourteen year old procrastinating on his geometry homework). When I shot “shot photos of a scuffle at a Biodemocracy protest a few months ago”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/2005/06/biodemocracy_pr.php a Philadelphia police detective was in my office an hour later wanting to see it (the “melee” was harmless except for a policeman with heart conditions who took that moment to have a heart attack).

While some monitoring and prudence is indeed necessary, what ties together the string of stories this week is the randomness of the targets. It’s as if the agencies had lost all sense of judgement. Anyone critical of the war (or even mainstream culture: witness the vegans) was considered a threat. All leads were investigated, no matter how silly.

While invading American’s privacy is upsetting and unwarranted, the greatest danger is the sheer mass of irrelevant information that’s been collected. What’s an agency to do with reams of data on bicycle riders and Quakers? Who’s watching the flight schools and fertilizer depots while Agent Nincompoop is trading hummus recipes with the cute vegan with the nosering?

It’s Official: US Abuse at Gitmo

Martin Kelley — Tue, 30 Nov 2004 08:43:56 +0000

While the images of U.S. soliders torturing iraqi prisoners at Al Grahib Prison in Badgdad have been broadcast around the world, US officials have frequently reassured us that conditions at the U.S. detention camp in Guantamano Bay, Cuba, were acceptable and in accord with the Geneva Convention’s rules for treatment of prisoners. As proof the Pentagon and Bush Administration have frequently cited the fact that the International Red Cross regularly inspects prison conditions at Guantamano. They forgot to tell us what they’ve seen.
A confidential report prepared by the International Red Cross this summer found that conditions at Guantamano Bay were “tantamount to torture.” Strong words from a cautious international body. Because of the way the IRC works, its reports are not made available to the public but instead presented to the accused government, in the hope that they will correct their practices. In predicable fashion, the Bush Adminstration privately denied any wrongdoing and kept the IRC findings secret. In a display of incredible audacity it then defended itself _from other accusations of torture_ by citing the IRC’s presence at Guantanamo, conveniently omitting the IRC’s strongly-worded criticisms. Amazing really.
The IRC report is still secret. We only know of it second-hand, from a memo obtained by the _Times_ that quotes from some of its findings (“Red Cross Finds Detainee Abuse in Guantanamo“http://www.nytimes.com/2004/11/30/politics/30gitmo.html, Nov 29). What kind of stuff is going on there? The _Times_ recently interviewed British prisoners who had been detained in Afghanistan and iraq and sent to Guantanamo Bay. Here’s one story:
bq. One one regular procedure was making uncooperative prisoners strip to their underwear, having them sit in a chair while shackled hand and foot to a bolt in the floor, and forcing them to endure strobe lights and loud rock and rap music played through two close loudspeakers, while the air-conditioning was turned up to maximum levels.
It’s not needles under fingernails or electrodes to the privates, but it is indeed “tantamount to torture.” While it was hard to believe these prisoners’ stories when they were first published a few months ago, they become much more credible in light of the IRC conclusions.
We still don’t know about what’s happening in the camp. The Bush Administration has the power, not to mention the duty, to immediately release International Red Cross reports. But the United States has chosen to suppress the report. No torturing government has ever admitted to its actions. Saddam Hussein himself denied wrongdoing when _he_ ran the Al Grahib prison and used it for torture. We rely on bodies like the International Red Cross to keep us honest.
There are those who defend torture by appealing to our fears, many of which are indeed grounded in reality. We’re at war, the enemy insurgents are playing dirty, Osama bin Laden broke any sort of international conventions when he sent airliners into the World Trade Center. Very true. But the United States has a mission. I believe in the idealistic notion that we should be a beacon to the world. We should always strive for the moral high ground and invite the world community to join us. We haven’t been doing that lately. Yes it’s easier to follow the lead of someone like Saddam Hussein and just torture anyone we suspect of plotting against us. But do we really want him as our role model?

NVA: US Military Draft Probably Isn’t Coming Back

Martin Kelley — Thu, 26 Aug 2004 12:01:15 +0000

Rick Jahnkow argues in May’s _Nonviolent Activist_ that there’s a “Decreased Likelihood of Draft”:http://www.warresisters.org/nva0504‑3.htm. There are many aging pacifists that have become obsessed lately with the idea that compulsory military service might be returning to the United States. For example, I’ve watched the leader of one annual anti-draft workshop predict the draft’s imminent return year after year, in ever more excited terms and wondered what evidence this organizer has seen that I haven’t.
Jahnkow watches this issue as much as anyone in his work for the San Diego-based “Committee Opposed to Militarism and the Draft”:http://www.comdsd.org/ and he’s been watching the hype build as he’s become more skeptical:
bq. Warnings about an impending draft have been circulating on the Internet for months now. Some are tying a possible draft to the election and predicting with bold certainty that conscription will be introduced in 2005… The energy that�s been generated on this topic has been both amazing and, I have to confess, somewhat seductive to anti-draft organizations like the one for which I work.
Most of the people I’ve seen get excited by a possible return of the draft were in their teens back in the Vietnam War era. Their organizing sometimes seems almost nostalgic for the issues of their youth. They’re trying to save the current generation from having to go through the same trauma. But the older activists’ anti-draft work is often patronistic and self-congratulatory, for it doesn’t take into account the fact that younger Americans don’t need saving.
The bottom line truth is that the Pentagon simply couldn’t reinstate the draft. Jahnkow cites a recent CNN/USA Today/Gallup poll that found that 88 percent of people 18–29 oppose a return of the draft. There would be mass mayhem if the draft returned. While some young men would surely obey, a huge percentage would actively defy it. Even if only 10% dramatically refused, the system would break down. This is a generation raised in a post-punk culture and many of its members aggressively question authority. They were raised by parents who lived through the sixties and saw widespread lies and abuse of power, including the Vietnam War and the Watergate scandal. The media mythology around sixties-era radicalism has kept us from realizing that there’s a baseline of everyday radicalism today that far overshadows much of what was going on thirty years ago. The Pentagon knows this better than the peace movement does.
It’s not the only nostalgic protesting this generation is engaging in these days and I’ve compared revived organizing around “phone war tax resistance”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000230.php to “recycling dead horses.” I agree with Rick that today’s teens and twenty-somethings have real issues which we need to address. He says it so well:
bq. The latter point leads me to the second reason why I have some negative feelings about the current concern over the draft: Much of the anxiety is coming from people who are ignoring the more pressing problem of aggressive military recruiting, which, among other things, disproportionately affects non-affluent youths and people of color. In essence, there has been a draft for these individuals�a poverty draft�and yet it has drawn relatively little attention from antiwar activists. There is a race and class bias reflected in this that needs to be seriously considered and addressed by the general peace movement.
“Here’s the link to his article again”:http://www.warresisters.org/nva0504‑3.htm
h4. Related:
* Last November we published a provocative article by pacifist Johann Christoph Arnold arguing that “A Military Draft Would be Good for Us”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000231.php and a personal response piece I wrote about how the “pressures of a military draft”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/000231.php can force an eighteen year old to really think hard about issues of war and peace.
* Nonviolence.org has guide to issues of “military conscription and conscientious objection”:http://www.nonviolence.org/issues/conscience.php. We also watch issues of the “peace movement”:http://www.nonviolence.org/articles/cat_peace_movement.php, and tend to highlight generational issues a lot.
* The Urban Legend debunkers at Snopes.com have tracked and researched the “draft fear emails going around”:http://www.snopes.com/politics/military/draft.asp. They don’t think a draft is coming back and any time soon, citing many sources.

Exporting Prison Abuse to the World?

Martin Kelley — Sat, 08 May 2004 10:51:52 +0000

An article on “abuse of prisoners in the U.S.”:http://www.nytimes.com/2004/05/08/national/08PRIS.html?hp in the _NY Times_ shows that Lane McCotter, the man who oversaw the reopening of the Abu Ghraib prison in iraq, was forced to resign a U.S. prison post “after an inmate died while shackled to a restraining chair for 16 hours. The inmate, who suffered from schizophrenia, was kept naked the whole time.” It was Attorney General John Ashcroft who hand-picked the officials who went to iraq.
As an American I’m ashamed but not terribly surprised to see what happened in the U.S.-run prisons in iraq. Militaries are institutions designed to command with force and only civilian oversight will ultimately keep any military insitution free from this sort of abuse. The “Red Cross had warned of prisoner mistreatment”:http://story.news.yahoo.com/news?tmpl=story&cid=514&e=3&u=/ap/20040508/ap_on_re_mi_ea/iraq_prisoner_abuse but was largely ignored. Abu Ghraib is in the news in part because of a leaked Pentagon report, yet it’s only after CBS News aired the pictures and the New Yorker quoted parts of the reports and turned it into a scandal that President Bush or Defense Secretary Rumsfeld admitted to the problems and gave their half-hearted apologies.
_This is not to say all soldiers are abusive or all prison guards are abusive_. Most soldiers and most guards are good, decent people, serving out of call to duty and (often) because of economic necessities. But when the system is privatized and kept secret, we allow for corruption that put even the good people in positions where they are pressured to do wrong.
It is precisely because the Pentagon instinctively keeps reports like the one on the abuse conditions inside the Abu Ghraib prison secret that conditions are allowed to get this bad. That prison, along with the one at Guantanamo Bay remain largely off-limits to international law. It was probably only a few Americans that gave the orders for the abuse but it was many more who followed and many many more–all of us in one way or another–who have gave the go-ahead with our inattention to issues of justice in prisons.

Blueprint for a Mess, the planning behind the U.S. occupation

Martin Kelley — Mon, 03 Nov 2003 19:17:12 +0000

For those asleep for the past two years, the _New York Times Magazine_ has a long article by David Rieff, “Blueprint for a Mess”:www.nytimes.com/2003/11/02/magazine/02iraq.html, that looks at ongoing problems with the U.S. occupation of iraq:
bq. Historically, it is rare that a warm welcome is extended to an occupying military force for very long, unless, that is, the postwar goes very smoothly. And in iraq, the postwar occupation has not gone smoothly.
The article looks at the ideological roots of the post-war plan of occupation. A number of key decisions were made in the Pentagon’s war room with little input from the State Department. Much of the planning revolved around Ahmad Chalabi, the two-bit, self-proclaimed iraqi opposition party leader during the last decade of Saddam Hussein’s reign. Chalabi spent most of the 90s in London and Washington, where he became the darling of the Republican policy hawks who were also sidelined from political power. Together Chalabi and Washington figures like Donald Rumsfeld spent the 90s hatching up war plans if they ever took power again. Unfortunately Rumsfeld’s plans didn’t have the widespread support of the U.S. diplomatic and military establishment and Chalabi has had virtually no support inside iraq. But the conversations and decisions between the token iraqi opposition and the out-of-power Republican hawks has driven the occupation:
bq. The lack of security and order on the ground in iraq today is in large measure a result of decisions made and not made in Washington before the war started, and of the specific approaches toward coping with postwar iraq undertaken by American civilian officials and military commanders in the immediate aftermath of the war.
Rieff is pessimistic but he backs up his claims. The article is long but it’s a must-read. The postwar occupations of iraq and Afghanistan will almost certainly be the defining foreign policy issue of this generation, and pacifists must look beyond ideology and rhetoric to understand what’s happening in iraq.

Pentagon Movie- and Myth-Making

Martin Kelley — Wed, 20 Aug 2003 23:54:48 +0000

There’s an interesting conversation over at TalkLeft about the Pentagon’s vetting of movie scripts. One of the next movies they’re working on is a dramatization of the the already highly-embellished story of the “rescue” of Private Jessica Lynch in Iraq (one’s tempted to ask whether a movie about her could even say “Based on a True Story”).

Duck Rogers Gamma Ray Bombs

Martin Kelley — Thu, 14 Aug 2003 14:25:59 +0000

Like something out of an old Looney Toons reel, the U.S. military is “trying to build a death ray bomb”:www.guardian.co.uk/usa/story/0,12271,1018361,00.html. Part of the next generation of boutique nuclear weapons the Pentagon craves, this one kills by sending nuclear gamma rays. The _Guardian_ article talks about how development of the new weapon might lead to a new arms race. This is of course quite possible: new weapons throw off the balance of power and often create the perceived need for new defences in a continuing cycle.
One wonders why the U.S. needs to be building ever more sophisticated weapons of mass destruction. It already has enough nuclear weapons to ensure total destruction of a country and the two recent wars have shown that its military is quite efficient at invasion. A gamma ray weapon wouldn’t help in a situation like North Korea, where there are more-conventional weapons they could strike back with that would seriously hurt U.S. or its allies (even without their renewed nuclear weapon program their short-range missiles would devastate South Korea and Japan).