Post #40 - Moral Deafness

Some of our recent leaders seems to have the ethical equivalent of leprosy. That requires some explaining, I know. In his book, A World Waiting to Be Born, M. Scott Peck, MD cites the peculiar way in which this disease disables, which serve as metaphor for moral decay:

"The primary way in which the causative agent, Hansen's bacillus, wreaks its havoc is it affinity for settling along those nerve fibers that carry the sensation of pain and then destroying them. It thereby creates a condition of painlessness. A leper [might] severely burn her fingers while not realizing she had placed them too close to the flame....Pain is a signal of disease, not the disease itself. Indeed, it is primarily a disease-preventing mechanism. Without it we would all quickly become crippled...we need to experience pain for our healing and health."

President Bush often appeared unconcerned about poll numbers, public criticism or international condemnation. Donald Rumsfeld was curiously impervious to any advice from subordinates that contradicted his own conceptions. Richard Cheney sought no advice from those who opposed him and still evinces a complete lack of caring about their outrage. On the whole, this group appeared to experience none of the "pain" that can lead us to remove our hand from the stove, or go to the doctor to close a wound. They are not humbled by war as Lincoln was, haunted by dissent as Lyndon Johnson was, or even infuriated by attacks as Nixon was. So, wounds fester and infection runs rampant in the body politic. "Most of the evil in this world," Peck says, "is committed by people who are absolutely certain that they know what they are doing."

Ron Paul (R-TX), a Libertarian member of Congress, speaking on the floor of the House, put this is a geopolitical context: "Intervention just doesn’t work. It backfires and ultimately hurts American citizens both at home and abroad. Spreading ourselves too thin around the world actually diminishes our national security through a weakened military. As the superpower of the world, a constant interventionist policy is perceived as arrogant, and greatly undermines our ability to use diplomacy in a positive manner."

John R. Bolton

Yet, as the presidential elections of 2004 approached, people such as John R. Bolton, we now know from his book Surrender Is Not an Option, was actively working against a diplomatic approach. As then-U.N. ambassador, he undermined the efforts of two secretaries of state, first Gen. Colin Powell, then his successor Condoleeza Rice, to follow the Europeans' lead in developing a package of "carrots" for Iran to match our military strength, as inducements to begin a real dialogue. He is reported as having admitted that he "used every possible bureaucratic and diplomatic maneuver to kill Powell's plan [to forge a deal with Iran]. He succeeded.

In October of 2007, Black Commentator was sympathizing with Rice, seeing her undercut at every turn by neo-conservative factions who do not support her efforts to engineer peace in Palestine or the resolve the Iranian impasse peacefully. They quoted Shmuel Rosner, chief Washington correspondent for Haaretz, as saying dismissively, "Nothing in Rice's career has prepared her for this Middle Eastern bazaar. It is hard to see how she will emerge from it with a valid achievement in hand...Rice insists that Bush strongly supports her moves. Maybe she knows something that others don't see yet."  I wish that had been so.

While we are nearly out of Iraq, in terms of major troop presence, the war in Afghanistan drags on, and most of the 700+ military bases we maintain around the world are still open for business. The Pentagon may have allowed some cuts in certain weapons programs, but the total cost of our "defense" continues to increase, year-by-year, despite the end of the Cold War over twenty years ago. The situation in Israel/Palestine is no closer to resolution. Quite simply, "It's deja vu all over again" as Yogi Berra put it.

Post #39 - The Arrogance of Power

"Pride goes before destruction, and a folly before a fall." (Proverbs 16:18)

"The average age of the world's greatest civilizations has been two hundred years.
These nations have progressed through this sequence:
From bondage to spiritual faith;
from spiritual faith to great courage;
from courage to liberty;
from liberty to abundance;
from abundance to selfishness;
from selfishness to complacency;
from complacency to apathy;
from apathy to dependence;
from dependency back again into bondage."

(Sir Alex Fraser Tyler, 1742-1813, Scottish jurist and historian )

America began with vast land and natural resources (the fact that there were a number of people -- non-Europeans -- already living here was only a temporary impediment). The colonies, later the young nation, thrived in part because of isolation behind two great oceans and its (mostly) pacific relations with its neighbors to the north and south. Yet, in the twentieth century – the “American century”, as it has been called – the United States expanded its Monroe Doctrine of hegemony in this hemisphere to a Reagan-Bush doctrine of hegemony worldwide. The already fairly macho “Speak softly and carry a big stick” of Teddy Roosevelt morphed into “The one with the big stick speaks; others listen – or suffer the consequences.” Under the current administration, the stick is approximately the same size, but the message sometimes seems ambiguous.

Former US Embassy, Tehran (credit: Daniel Brennwald)

In May 2003, a message was conveyed from Iran, by fax, to the US Department of State using the intermediary services of the Swiss ambassador in Tehran, Tim Guldimann. In that message (apparently itself a response to a U.S. “feeler” received in Iran one month earlier), the Iranians put virtually everything on the table for discussion. They listed U.S. concerns as including:

• Weapons of mass destruction – that Iran should relinquish any attempt to develop or obtain such weapons
• Terrorism – that Iran should move against any Al Qaeda members in Iran and share intelligence with the United States
• Iraq – that Iran should support stabilization and democratization efforts there
• Middle East – that support to Hamas, Hezbollah and other such groups be ceased

They identified the following concerns of their own:

• Regime change – that the United States give up trying to oust the IRI
• Sanctions – that the West dismantle the system of economic sanctions
• Iraq – that the United States help root out the MKO (mujaheddin), control Turkish cross-border activity and respect Iranian/Iraqi links around religious sites and trade
• Technology – that Iran have access to peaceful nuclear, biological and chemical technologies
• Security assurances – that Iran's interests in national and regional security be recognized
• Terrorism – that MKO within the United States be the object of government action (undefined)

In addition, a framework procedure for addressing these concerns was laid out. The Swiss diplomat who acted as the go-between reached his own conclusion that this was a serious overture, approved at the highest level of the Iranian government -- “I got the clear impression that there is a strong will of the regime to tackle the problem with the United States now and to try it with this initiative.” The United States, incredibly, failed to respond in any way to the memorandum, though it was examined and discussed within the Department of State, seen by members of Congress and conveyed to the White House national security staff. The State Department, when queried about this strange lapse claimed “This document did not come through official channels but rather was a creative exercise on the part of the Swiss ambassador.”

In fact, according to Flynt Leverett, who was a senior Middle East expert in the government at that time, said, “This was just the Swiss doing their job.” The only channel that now exists between Iran and the White House is the U.S. Interests Section at the Swiss Embassy in Tehran, established for just this kind of intermediation.

Leverett explained the potential importance of this document:

"If you compare this document to the messages that came in from the Chinese through Pakistani intermediaries to the Nixon administration 1970 and 1971, messages that ultimately produced Kissinger's trip to China and then Nixon's break-through visit to China – if you compare the Chinese messages that came in – and they're available at the GWU [George Washington University] National Security Archives online – if you compare those messages with this Iranian proposal, [it] is more substantive, more detailed than the Chinese proposals that came in to the Nixon administration. The problem here is the way this administration responded to Iranian proposal compared with the way the Nixon administration responded to these Chinese messages..."

Then-Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice claimed never to have seen the document. Her response to a reporter's question in June of the previous year belies that version of history, in that it clearly failed to deny the memo:

"QUESTION: Some officials who work with you at the White House and at the State Department said that the U.S. missed an opportunity in 2003, that Iran came to the U.S., wanted to talk, and the U.S. rejected that. And that was a period when the U.S. was stronger. It appears that the U.S. is coming to this in a much weaker position. Aren’t you?

SECRETARY RICE: Oh, I think coming to the table with the entire international community united around a particular course is a pretty strong position to be in. What people wanted, what the Iranians wanted earlier, was to be one-on-one with the United States so that this could be about the United States and Iran. Now it is Iran the international community, and Iran has to answer to the international community. I think that’s the strongest possible position to be in."

Nicholas D. Kristof, Pulitzer Prize-winning columnist for the New York Times, wrote in 2007:

"Hard-liners in the Bush administration killed discussions of a deal, and interviews with key players suggest that was an appalling mistake. There was a real hope for peace; now there is a real danger of war.

"...It's not clear to me that a grand bargain was reachable, but it was definitely worth pursuing — and still is today."

Instead, Bush administration hard-liners aborted the process. Another round of talks had been scheduled for Geneva, and Ambassador Zarif showed up — but not the U.S. side. That undermined Iranian moderates, perhaps impacting the strength of their position in the ill-fated 2009 elections, when the regime fought back mercilessly against the challenge of the "Green Movement."

A U.S.-Iranian rapprochement could have saved lives in Iraq, isolated Palestinian terrorists and encouraged civil society groups in Iran. But instead the U.S. hard-liners chose to hammer plowshares into swords. Leverett took pains to emphasize the critical importance of this sequence of events in determining what happened after that:

Dave Robinson, at a mosque in Natanz, Iran

'Let me point out that at the time the proposal came in the spring of 2003, Iran wasn't enriching uranium. They weren't spinning centrifuges...This is one of the costs that ignoring this proposal has imposed on the United States. They have made significant advances in their nuclear program over the last three and a half years since this proposal came in. And I think...zero enrichment as part of a settlement of the nuclear issue is now a pretty remote possibility. If we had moved in 2003, I think it would have been a real option..."[The document itself can be seen at the website: http://www.armscontrol.org/pdf/2003_Spring_Iran_Proposal.pdf]

Dave Robinson, of Pax Christi, on his second trip to Iran in recent years, spoke with the Iranian president: "I specifically asked President Ahmadinezhad his thoughts on the Iraq Study Group's recommendation to include Iran in regional discussions on the violence in Iraq. He responded that Iran has a clear interest in ending the violence in Iraq. He said that last year [2006], the U.S. asked the Iranians for help in Iraq. Unfortunately, he said, no one in Iran trusts the U.S. Administration, but regardless, he had “friends” respond to the Administration's request. They never heard another word."

No one should underestimate the difficulty of reaching an agreement with the current government of Iran. Its complex leadership structure and the past history with our country mean that every inch of the journey would have to be treated like a walk through a mine field. But, have we truly tried?

Post #38 - The Pot Calling the Kettle Black

Not long ago a newspaper article cited U.S.-China sniping over human rights. Nothing newsworthy in that, of course. What was different is that these days there is actually a credible case to be made from the Chinese side. The People's Republic of China brought up abuses committed by U.S. troops and intelligence agents at Abu Ghraib Prison. They mentioned the murky legal status and endless detention at Guantanamo of nationals of many countries. They criticized U.S. spying on our own citizens, whether talking on the phone, using computers or traveling from point A to point B. “We urge the U.S. Government,” the Chinese Premier's office wrote, “to acknowledge its own human rights problems and stop interfering in other countries' internal affairs under the pretext of human rights.” Just a few days later, Russian officials echoed the Chinese message. We still have a country that is an enviable place to live (demand for visas to the United States shows no signs of letting up). But, if American support of basic human rights seems more like “pretext” than true witness, then we have lost two of the strongest “weapons” we had: ethical example and moral suasion.

Ivan Eland, of the Independent Institute, noted in a March, 2007 analysis of the Chinese complaints:

"China also cited Martin Sheinin, U.N. special rapporteur on the promotion and protection of human rights and fundamental freedoms, as saying that parts of the U.S. Military Commissions Act violate the Geneva Conventions.

"In 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court ruled that habeas corpus – the ancient right of a prisoner to challenge his or her detention – could not be denied to detainees at…Guantanamo…Despite this…the Military Commissions Act…prohibited federal courts from hearing habeas petitions…The Constitution clearly states that the writ of habeas corpus shall not be suspended…no exception is made for non-citizens or persons held…outside U.S. territory…If habeas corpus can be so denied, the U.S. government can kidnap people off the streets anywhere in the world, declare them “enemy combatants,” and hold them secretly and indefinitely without being charged, having access to legal counsel, being able to challenge their detention, and having a trial…

"Some would say that legal niceties, such as habeas corpus, impeded the war [on terrorism]…but for [that] battle…to succeed, the right people must be apprehended. The purpose of habeas corpus is to catch mistakes the government might make in detaining the wrong person….a significant number of prisoners at Guantanamo were arrested by mistake and are not terrorists…

"Governments behave much the same everywhere – they seek to expand their jurisdiction, authority, and resources...What is supposed to make America unique is…independent branches, which scrutinize and constrain each other’s power. Unfortunately, that system of checks and balances has now been seriously eroded."

It has been disturbing to many that the Obama administration, despite its initial enthusiasm for reversing the Bush approach to detention of suspects, has not managed to extricate itself from the legacy that president left behind.  They are still prisoners held at Guantanamo and the government still cites official secrecy to hold basic information close to the vest.

As we bemoan the eroding of the rights of habeas corpus, the head of the Iranian judiciary, as a part his efforts to reform Iran's legal system, in February 2008, issued a decree prohibiting the detention of suspects without being charged. Will we pass them going in the other direction one day? Not likely.  But around the United States, in airports (under private or federal jurisdiction), in the halls of Congress, and in our schools, people are being asked to defend rights which we have come to take for granted: a woman wearing a No Iran War T-shirt was refused entrance to the convention center in our nation's capital; an Iraqi-born architect and human rights activist was refused entrance to his plane to take off from JFK because his shirt had Arabic characters on it; a Hunter College student was refused a seat on the Staten Island Ferry because she wore one that said "We Will Not Be Silent" -- the message on her shirt comes from White Rose, a non-violent group of students from the University of Munich who opposed the Nazi Regime, and were executed for their exercise of free speech.

Sophie Scholl

Alex Schmorell

Hans Scholl

Post #37 - Why Lie?

Challenger Crew

"Much has been written about the impulse to mislead, to deceive, and to cover-up. In a Washington Post column in 2007, Shankar Vedantam wrote about public figures who issued statements that didn't square with reality, but who appear to have believed the falsehoods or exaggerations they were offering up: Truman, who in his diary held that women and children would not be victims of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Clinton, who convinced himself that Lincoln Room visitors and persons pardoned by him were treated entirely properly; NASA officials, feeling that the O-ring problem discovered in the lead-up to the Challenger launch was “manageable.”

Why, Vedantam asked, would our evolving human psyche benefit from having a capacity for self-deception? The answer he found: because it is much easier to lie convincingly is one believes the lie oneself. He quoted Robert L. Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University: “Self-deception evolves in the service of deceit for two reasons. It improves your ability to fool others and, second, it reduces the cognitive costs of deception.” In other words, if what one says and what one believes are consonant, the emotional stress is lessened, even if the information presented is skewed or flatly false. Vedantam quotes Reagan advisor Lyn Nofziger as saying, about Reagan, that he was able to “convince himself that the truth is what he wants it to be. Most politicians are unable to do this, but they would give their eyeteeth if they could.”

At no time is this tendency greater than in times of war. Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese general of 2500 years ago, held that “the whole art of war rests on deception.” Samuel Johnson said: “Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.” A person of faith – especially one entrusted with great power and authority -- must pray for discernment. During the Watergate period, what most distinguished the Hugh Sloan (a sector tier official of the Committee to Reelect the President) from his co-conspirators was his own sense of something being wrong. Others in the inner circle -- daily breathing the rarified air of the White House, more captivated by their own sense of importance, wishing to change the world -- failed to awaken to the illegality or immorality of the incremental choices they had made on their way to ultimate public disgrace.

Dr. M. Scott Peck, popular author of The Road Less Traveled, wrote on this confusion in his less-known book People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil. He postulates that a type of narcissism lies at the core of those who become capable of serious evil.

"House" - Fox Broadcasting Company

"Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life – usually in the name of righteousness.

"...Their “goodness” is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the “people of the lie.”...They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach."

Post #36 - Deception

"...false prophets will rise and show great signs and wonders to deceive, if possible, even the elect. (Matthew 24:24)

"...your merchants were the great men of the earth, for by your sorcery all the nations were deceived. (Revelation 18:23)

"We will be told: What can literature do against the pitiless onslaught of naked violence? Let us not forget that violence does not and cannot flourish by itself; it is inevitably intertwined with LYING. Between them there is the closest, the most profound and natural bond: nothing screens violence except lies, and the only way lies can hold out is by violence. Whoever has once announced violence as his METHOD must inexorably choose lying as his PRINCIPLE. At birth, violence behaves openly and even proudly. But as soon as it becomes stronger and firmly established, it senses the thinning of the air around it and cannot go on without befogging itself in lies, coating itself with lying's sugary oratory. It does not always or necessarily go straight for the gullet; usually it demands of its victims only allegiance to the lie, only complicity in the lie." (Alexander Solzhenitsyn, Nobel Lecture, 1970)

Virtually all critiques of the previous U.S. administration – by progressives, by conservatives, by allies and by foes – included the fact that members of the government were less than completely truthful, in order to further their agenda. The “hit parade” of missteps and mendacity include:

• Allegation that weapons of mass destruction were a proven asset of Saddam's Iraq
• Assertion of Saddam Hussein's direct collaboration with Al Qaeda
• Denial of policies that allowed or condoned rendition and torture of prisoners
• Denial of eavesdropping practices in violation of existing U.S. law
• Contradictory explanations for the firing of a number of U.S. Attorneys
• Avoidance of full disclosure regarding the leaking of CIA agent Valerie Plame's identity to the press
• Denial of planning for an attack on Iran

Perhaps partly because of the lies of Watergate, Contragate and the Iraq War, many Americans now suspect their president of lying about the facts of his own birth, despite all evidence to the contrary. Similarly, after Tonkin Gulf, many were prepared to believe conspiracy theories regarding the assassination of JFK. In other words: Lies have consequences.

A great many luminaries spoke at the Washington National Cathedral in March 2007, to help bring an end to the Iraq War. Sharing the podium with them was Celeste Zappala, a Gold Star mother from the First United Methodist Church of Germantown, PA. Her son, Sherwood, died protecting the Iraq survey group as they searched for the WMD that did not exist. She told the congregants:

"And an ocean of tears spreads across both countries...A wail rises from the throat of all who love these people and shakes our hearts as it reaches for the crucified arms of Jesus.

Celeste Zappala

"We are here tonight as the church. Each one of us is a witness to this war and to our own complicity in it – when were we silent and should have spoken, whose eyes would we not meet to face the truth?

"Now we are prostrate at this altar – begging: Lord help us. War is our failure to love you, and peace is your command. Peace is not the easy way out; its creation is the most confounding, the hardest thing we can do. Help us."

Lies have consequences that ripple like circles from a pebble thrown in a pond. William Hart notes:

"The destructive effects of lying, many thinkers have said, go well beyond merely the issuance of incorrect data or the violation of some code of polite conduct -- or even the uncanny offensiveness of the local car-dealer commercial. Every lie, they say, has many victims. It attacks us all; in fact, by attacking the fundamental expectation of veracity that must exist among members of a functioning society, it gradually dissolves the glue that makes communal existence possible. If deception becomes routine, it degrades our precious human gifts of language and reason, and ultimately promotes chaos.

"Nuclear arms expert, Richard Rhodes, has explored the phenomenon of 'threat inflation.' Both sides in an antagonistic situation lack hard intelligence about the other's intentions and capabilities. Risk-averse planners embrace worst-case scenarios, depend on dubious data, and propose strategies that will cover all eventualities (emphasizing the concrete and quantifiable military options over the "fuzzy" diplomatic ones). These strategies, however, themselves push arms of the balance toward doomsday, rather than toward resolution of differences. It is a global game of 'chicken,' in which each side cannot bear the thought that they took their foot off the gas a moment too soon, allowing the other to cruise to triumph, while they steep in humiliation. This works even under conditions of total sincerity and genuine concern for preservation of human life; the process is easily accelerated if elements on one side (or both) see some advantage in reaching a climactic confrontation. Then, the risk-averse are goaded on by the risk-immune and those who seek peaceful outcomes are effectively marginalized."

Much has been written about the impulse to mislead, to deceive, and to cover-up. In a Washington Post column in April 2007, Shankar Vedantam wrote about public figures who issued statements that didn't square with reality, but who appear to have believed the falsehoods or exaggerations they were offering up: Truman, who in his diary held that women and children would not be victims of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki; Clinton, who convinced himself that Lincoln Room visitors and persons pardoned by him were treated entirely properly; NASA officials, feeling that the O-ring problem discovered in the lead-up to the Challenger launch was “manageable.”

Why, Vedantam asked, would our evolving human psyche benefit from having a capacity for self-deception? The answer he found: because it is much easier to lie convincingly is one believes the lie oneself. He quotes Robert L. Trivers, an evolutionary biologist at Rutgers University: “Self-deception evolves in the service of deceit for two reasons. It improves your ability to fool others and, second, it reduces the cognitive costs of deception.” In other words, if what one says and what one believes are consonant, the emotional stress is lessened, even if the information presented is skewed or flatly false. Vedantam quotes Reagan advisor Lyn Nofziger as saying, about Reagan, that he was able to “convince himself that the truth is what he wants it to be. Most politicians are unable to do this, but they would give their eyeteeth if they could.”

At no time is this tendency greater than in times of war. Sun Tzu, the famous Chinese general of 2500 years ago, held that “the whole art of war rests on deception.” Samuel Johnson said: “Among the calamities of war, may be justly numbered the diminution of love of truth, by the falsehoods which interest dictates, and credulity encourages.” A person of faith – especially one entrusted with great power and authority -- must pray for discernment. During the Watergate period, what most distinguished the Hugh Sloan (a sector tier official of the Committee to Reelect the President) from his co-conspirators was his own sense of something being wrong. Others in the inner circle -- daily breathing the rarified air of the White House, more captivated by their own sense of importance, wishing to change the world -- failed to awaken to the illegality or immorality of the incremental choices they had made on their way to ultimate public disgrace.

Dr. M. Scott Peck, popular author of The Road Less Traveled, wrote on this confusion in his book People of the Lie: the Hope for Healing Human Evil. He postulates that a type of narcissism lies at the core of those who become capable of serious evil:

"Strangely enough, evil people are often destructive because they are attempting to destroy evil. The problem is that they misplace the locus of the evil. Instead of destroying others they should be destroying the sickness within themselves. As life often threatens their self-image of perfection, they are often busily engaged in hating and destroying that life – usually in the name of righteousness.

"...Their “goodness” is all on a level of pretense. It is, in effect, a lie. This is why they are the “people of the lie.”...They cannot or will not tolerate the pain of self-reproach."

Post #35 - Fashioning Serviceable Realities

Clausevitz said, “War is inconceivable without a clearly defined image of the enemy.” Chris Hedges, in his important book War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning, outlines the ways language is used to shape our world-view – most especially when we are on a path to war. Hedges (who, as a journalist, has covered more battles at close quarters than most of us would ever want to think about) helps us to understand why the phrase “Axis of Evil” was so essential. Hedges quotes George Orwell: “though strictly speaking it had not always been the same war...The enemy of the moment always represented absolute evil.” As Daniel Perlmutter put it, “Human beings have often created elaborate justifications for killing, but the simplest is that the enemy was 'less than human.'” Coupled with the fact that “the limits of our language are the limits of our world” (as expressed in Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein’s axiom), one can say: take over our language, and you take over our minds.

But it is not just “the other” whose face must change as we move toward war. Hedges says, “In wartime the state seeks to destroy its own culture.” An America founded on diversity is suddenly deaf to any but officially-approved views. To the powers that be, Orwell said, “dissidents are the most dangerous. They give us an alternative language, one that refuses to define the other as ‘barbarian’ or ‘evil,’ one that recognizes the humanity of the enemy...” We see this today in the rowdy CodePink demonstrators, the intellectuals who point to every instance of "the emperor's new clothes" and the determinedly unruly blogosphere. A country of cherished civil liberties starts cutting corners on privacy, access to official information and freedom of association. A “compassionate conservative” justifies indefinite detention and torture, while even some religious leaders defend it. A country of democratic ideals is ready to ally itself with despots, if they can help the immediately urgent cause -- for, as Hedges writes, “war forms its own culture…it distorts memory, corrupts language and infects everything around it.”

A book called Oath Betrayed was published (2007?) by Steven Miles, MD, a researcher with the University of Minnesota Medical Center. It gives the results of Miles' study of some 60,000 pages of official documents, released by the government (the lag for declassification is on the order of two years), on the involvement of medical personnel in U.S.-run prisons in Iraq, Afghanistan and Guantanamo. His focus was solely on those cases where doctors and other medical professionals were directly complicit in instances of beatings, asphyxiation, sodomy, abuse of children, the pouring and igniting of lighter fluid on the backs of prisoners' hands and other forms of torture. Miles said, in a recent Minnesota magazine article:

"This is easily the saddest and most disappointing academic project I've ever done. Not just because docs were involved, but also because this is not a U.S. military that I recognize and it's also not U.S. intelligence services that I recognize. I've had experience with both, and this is just outside of our history."

"[I don't see] the type of pressure that is brought to bear against health professionals who have protested torture in countries like Chile or Uruguay or the Soviet Union or Turkey, and risk being disappeared or tortured or killed or having their family members killed for that resistance. The pressure that was brought to bear was peer pressure, in some cases the threat of a transfer. But when I look at my colleagues in other torturing countries, I see them taking absolutely heroic and in some cases suicidal risks to protest torture. So I don't accept -- I simply do not accept -- the notion that the pressure was of a degree that should have caused them to be silent or complicit.

An interviewer asked the question, "Is torture ever justified if it could save lives?" Dr. Miles, who has obviously wrestled with this question for years in the course of his research, said:

"Every time a nation has decided that torture can be justified, it's wound up misusing it. They've taken a singular case and they've gone to a general practice. So I don't think that the technology of torture works. It doesn't produce reliable information. And we don't have a way of using that information in real time. And so I'd answer the question no.

"...since the end of World War II, the United States led the way on constructing and then piece by piece adding to international law designed to prevent the mistreatment of prisoners. First it was the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which was written by Eleanor Roosevelt. Then it was the Geneva Conventions. Then it was the Convention Against Torture. Then it was the U.S. War Crimes Act. Then it was the Torture Victims Relief Act...We have to figure out as a nation how to fix this new wound to civil society which we've inflicted by going down this path.

"...the real problem here is that torture is used generally by countries to suppress the emergence of civil society...[W]hen we say that a chief executive can appeal to national emergency and national sovereignty to justify torture, we've essentially given a green light for the suppression of civil societies around the world."

John F. Kennedy said, "We cannot, as a free nation, compete with our adversaries in tactics of terror, assassination, false promises, counterfeit mobs and crises." Recognizing the pernicious effect these techniques can have, and are having, the American Psychologists Association ruled in August that a psychologist cannot be a party to the kinds of interrogation techniques that have been used at U.S. facilities. The director of Physicians for Human Rights said, "You cannot practice ethical psychology in...the context of pervasive violation of human rights."

Shane Claiborne, founding partner of The Simple Way community in Philadelphia, wrote in the Sojourners Magazine of June 2007:

Shane Claiborne

"Violence is suicidal. Suicide rates of folks in the military and those working the chambers of death row execution are astronomical; they kill themselves as they feel the image of God dying in them...even as we see the horror of death, may we be reminded that in the end love wins. Mercy triumphs. Life is more powerful than death. And even those who have committed great violence can have the image of God come to life again within them as they hear the whisper of love. May the whisper of love grow louder than the thunder of violence. May we love loudly."

And, now, the most ironic element in this agonizing debate about the infliction of agony: it probably does not work. A new book, by Ali H. Soufan and Daniel Freedman gives the lie to the idea that torture is a necessary part of the interrogator's box of tools. From a review of the book by Dina Temple-Raston (counterrorism correspondent for NPR) in the Washington Post (October 30, 2011): "Soufan, a fluent Arabic speaker, was the [FBI's] go-to interrogator...he testified from behind a black curtain in the Senate Judiciary Committee's hearing room [in 2009] and said that 'enhanced interrogation techniques'...were 'harmful to our efforts to defeat al-Qaeda.'" The old adage that "you can catch more flies with honey than with vinegar" still has some mileage left on it, according to Soufan and other experts on interrogation. [Full disclosure: I am a member of the board of directors of the National Religious Coalition against Torture.]

Post #34 - Truth Matters

May God bless you with discomfort at: easy answers, half-truths... (Benedictine benediction)

From my training in philosophy at The College of William & Mary and the Institute of European Studies in Vienna (and earlier training at the knees of my own parents), I am persnickety about truth, even when it is inconvenient. I will take quite a bit of space to discuss what may seem like rather minor points to some. But, if you feel, as I do, that "for the want of a nail" certain important wars can be lost, bear with me...they can also be started with no more than a nail or two.

The press, politicians and pundits are quite fond of saying “President Ahmadinezhad called for Israel to be wiped off the face of the earth.” With slight variations, this has been repeated over and over again, so that virtually everyone in the West believes that the Iranian politician did, in fact, say that.

There is one problem, though: he didn't actually say it. Not only did he not say it, but many of those who repeat the quote to such effect know that he didn't say it. A more faithful rendering into English of what he said on the occasion in question would be: “Our dear Imam [Khomeini] offered that the regime occupying Jerusalem should pass from the pages of history.” (Here is an English-alphabet transliteration: “Imam-e-aziz-e maa farmoudand keh een rezhim-e ishghalgar-e qods bayad as safheh-ye ruzgar mahv shavad.” of the Persian: امام عزيز ما فرمودند كه اين رژيم اشغالگر قدس بايد از صفحه روزگار محو شود). I would say that "regime change" is a more reasonable take-away than genocide. [For a comprehensive explanation of this, see:
http://www. mohammadmossadegh.com/news/ rumor-of-the-century/]

The story about the story is what is especially instructive. On one side, you have a series of individuals working hard to set the record straight. University of Michigan professor Juan Cole, an expert on the Middle East (who, by the way, personally "despises everything Ahmadinezhad stands for") refuted the quotation publicly in the interest of simple truth and accuracy. Veteran journalist Jonathan Steele wrote about the error in The Guardian. Various non-profits, activists and bloggers took up the cry as well. The Middle East Research Institute, not known for giving Islamic sources the benefit of any doubt, used the more accurate and far more innocuous translation. The false quote was even officially condemned by all fifteen members of the United Nations Security Council, in October of 2005, when it had been cited by Israel to support a call for Iran's expulsion from the U.N.

But arrayed against them were the heavy hitters of the global media: Reuters, the Associated Press and the venerable BBC, in hundreds of separate stories over the past two years. Reuters, which calls itself "the largest international multi-media news agency," persists in standing by its story despite numerous complaints from its readers, foreign policy experts and press professionals regarding the faulty provenance of the quotation. They at first attributed the quote to an Iranian source, but later claimed it as their own translation.

The Associated Press, reputedly "the largest and oldest news organization in the world," managed to shift (by May 2007, nearly two years after the story broke) from using "Israel must be wiped off the map," to "The Zionist regime should be wiped off the map." This language is still partly incorrect, but significantly different in its implications. It has even "spun" the critiques by asserting that "his supporters have since argued Ahmadinezhad's words were mistranslated." Well aware of the many inputs from Western-based experts who carry no brief for the Iranian president, AP chose to color the story, rather than come clean themselves.

The BBC alone managed a reversal of sorts, although it has given several different versions of how it came to run the mistaken translation in the first place -- it was their own translation; it came from BBC Monitoring (an independent service provider); it was sourced from an Iranian agency. BBC, however, has still done little but acknowledge the controversy and stop running the quote as it originally appeared.

What has been the real-world impact of this quote, which has been the journalistic equivalent of the living dead, the quote that seemingly cannot be buried? June 2007 saw a member of the United States House of Representatives, Congressman Steve Rothman (D-NJ), making the following on-the-record statement on the floor of the House: "Here we have the President of a sovereign nation...who says that a fellow nation...should be wiped off the face of the Earth, the people killed...Mr. Ahmadinezhad [heads a nation] with an army and with a stated goal of acquiring nuclear weapons to use to carry out his homicidal, genocidal, lunatic delusions of wiping out the State of Israel."

Rothman was not just expressing his feelings; he was speaking in support of a resolution that actually passed the House, with only two dissenting votes, calling for a charge to be brought against President Ahmadinezhad by the United Nations of inciting genocide. Both of the members opposing the resolution, Reps. Ron Paul (R-TX) and Dennis Kucinich (D-OH) had previously warned their colleagues about the faulty translation that has led to so much mischief, but their warnings apparently fell on deaf ears.

My point is not that Ahmadinezhad is my idea of a proper leader for a proud country of over 70 million people, or that I have any insider knowledge about his nation's true intentions. He heads a sometimes brutal apparatus of governance, is no friend of human rights and is woefully ignorant of vast areas of history and current affairs. My point is that words have meanings and even false words repeated widely have impacts. Words can change our perception of reality, and that perception can move us to act in ways we might otherwise not have. Lewis Carroll, speaking through his character Humpty Dumpty (in Alice Through the Looking Glass) said that “When I use a word, it means just what I choose it to mean -- neither more nor less...The question is which is to be master -- that's all.” I fear that the irony he intended may be lost on many in public life, whose jobs entail “spinning” several stories every day before breakfast. Playing fast and loose with the truth were what got us into Iraq, and what may yet launch us into a shooting war with Iran.

In a January 20, 2005 MSNBC interview, Vice President Cheney said, however, “Given the fact that Iran has a stated policy that their objective is the destruction of Israel,” Israel might decide to attack Iran. This is the import of “mere words.”

President Bush was widely quoted telling an audience, another two years later: "After all, this is a government that has proclaimed its desire to build a nuclear weapon." He repeated the assertion on March 20, 2008, saying "They've declared they want to have a nuclear weapon to destroy people -- some in the Middle East." Now, Mr. Bush certainly knew that Iran had repeatedly and consistently asserted the peaceful intent of its nuclear programs, and expressly rejected the idea of obtaining nuclear weapons. Surely, this could not have been a simple slip of the tongue (on two different occasions), on a point that lies at the very core of the current contention between Iran and the West.

The Israeli president Shimon Peres, too, said at one point, according to Haaretz correspondent Barak Ravid, "Even if Putin says he is not convinced that Iran is conducting nuclear development for the purpose of war, everyone knows their true intentions, and many intelligence agencies throughout the world have proof that Iran is seeking to develop nuclear weapons for the purpose of war and death." This is coming from a country that not only fails to acknowledge the purpose of their own nuclear arsenal, but will not even admit that it exists, though "intelligence agencies throughout the world" are quite certain of it.

In another such suspicious aberration, Agence France Presse, in 2008 quoted an unnamed source in the IAEA to the effect that Iran had denied access to IAEA inspectors to visit the Iranian nuclear plant at Natanz. The report added: "Problems with inspections were confirmed by two other envoys in Vienna." The story was then widely reported by other news outlets. (IAEA) spokesman Marc Vidricaire, said the following day: "There is no truth to media reports claiming that the IAEA was not able to get access to Natanz. We have not been denied access at any time, including in the past few weeks. Normally we do not comment on such reports but this time we felt we had to clarify the matter. If we had a problem like that we would have to report to the (35-nation IAEA governing) board. That has not happened because this alleged event did not take place."

Most egregiously, an unsourced story in the Toronto National Post by an Iranian-born writer told of an action purportedly taken by the Iranian legislature requiring Jews to be visibly identified (reminiscent, obviously, of the Nazi-imposed yellow Star of David). Other markers were said to have been specified for Christians and Zoroastrians. The normally respectable Simon Wiesenthal Centre confirmed the allegation. It took only a few hours for the report to be shown up as a fabrication (by Jewish parliamentarians in Tehran), but the story had already been given life as a media fire-work and to took weeks to fizzle (it may smolder as urban myth today). As author Daniel Perlmutter said about miscaptioned photos, “corrections are rarely as persistent as the deception or error.”

A follow-up story in the same Canadian newspaper quoted Meir Javdanfar, an Israeli expert on Iran and the Middle East who was born and raised in Tehran, as saying "None of my sources in Iran have heard of this," he said. "I don't know where this comes from....In any case, there is no way that they could have forced Iranian Jews to wear this. The Iranian people would never stand for it." Yet, the response of the Canadian Prime Minister was surprising; unable to confirm the original story, he nonetheless said that the Iranian government was “very capable of this kind of action” -- a sort of “non-denial denial,” as journalists sometimes term it, of the original story.

The editor of Editor and Publisher, the authoritative journal covering all aspects of the North American newspaper industry for the past hundred years, Greg Mitchell, took the unusual step of criticizing one particular purveyor of questionable news stories. In a July 16 article, Mitchell noted that a New York Times writer, Michael R. Gordon, appeared to making a habit of breaking stories that ultimately proved to be false -- each with a similar predictable impact: to raise the drumbeats for war. In articles that Mitchell termed "deeply flawed," Gordon had brought the reading public in 2002 "the first detailed account of the aluminum tubes [sought by Iraq, and allegedly linked to their weapons program]. The article cited unidentified senior administration officials who insisted that the dimensions, specifications and numbers of tubes sought showed that they were intended for a nuclear weapons program. "This, of course," Mitchell points out, "proved bogus." The Gordon article cited also included this: “Iraq's nuclear program is not Washington's only concern. An Iraqi defector said Mr. Hussein had also heightened his efforts to develop new types of chemical weapons.... Hard-liners...argue that Washington dare not wait until analysts have found hard evidence that Mr. Hussein has acquired a nuclear weapon. The first sign of a 'smoking gun,' they argue, may be a mushroom cloud.”

Although the Times ended up editorially distancing itself from Gordon's misguided raising of the threat level on Saddam Hussein, he was still, Mitchell said, "writing scare stories that offer ammunition for the growing chorus of neo-cons calling for a U.S. strike against Iran...What’s most lamentable is that editors at The New York Times, who should have learned their lessons four years ago, are once again serving as [Gordon's] enablers...The danger of the Times article -- given the prominence attached to it -- is real. For example, Sen. Joe Lieberman responded to the allegations by asserting that this means Iran 'has declared war on us.'"

In point of fact, lax standards of accuracy only achieve the opposite of what our government intends: they aid and encourage an Iranian leader who has his own considerable domestic political challenges. Daniel Levy, who served as an adviser to Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, and headed more than one Israeli negotiating team on the Israel-Palestinian conflict, has said, "...where Ahmadinezhad is capable of most effectively pushing back domestically is, of course...when he points to the external enemy...it is clear [that] the more rhetoric is ratcheted up, the more Ahmadinezhad is given a life vest."

Selig Harrison, of the Center for International Policy, when he returned from a visit to Iran during which he met with a number of high-ranking officials, was interviewed by journalist Farid Zakaria on June 15, 2007. Harrison said that “Iran feels surrounded by hostile U.S. power;” to them “it looks like encirclement” and they “consider themselves vulnerable.” As Kenneth M. Pollack wrote, in his The Persian Puzzle: the Conflict between Iran and America (New York: Random House, 2004), “’Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean that someone’s not out to get you.’ And we [the United States] were out to get them.”