Concentration camps, USofA

 

I wonder whether this marker, which I photographed some years ago, has survived the Trump administration's disemboweling of federal signage about our history. Tule Lake was one of the country's World War II concentration camps for Japanese American civilians -- an episode so shameful that the victims eventually won some financial compensation from Congress.

 

Rebecca Gordon writes about the Trump regime's revived concentration camps for migrants at Tom Dispatch. 

 ... It’s no exaggeration to say that ICE detention camps now threaten to become a central instrument of repression under the Trump administration. As many as 40 people have died in the camps since Trump returned to office in January 2025. And those are only the deaths that have been publicly acknowledged.

... Concentration camps exist to support and expand the power of an authoritarian regime. They make everyone afraid of being treated like the current targets of the regime. Like state torture programs, concentration camps accelerate the process of dehumanizing groups of people in the public imagination. Such a process often begins by describing the target group as non-human, as “vermin” or “garbage” (as Trump has, of course, done). Ironically, the very act of placing people in inhumane conditions can amplify the public’s perception of their inhumanity. After all, would genuine human beings submit to such treatment? Would our good nation treat genuine human beings that way? ...

Gordon studies the ethical implications of torture. She's well equipped to describe what we must fear and fight to end.

The state of California marker at Tule Lake is far more informative than the NPS signage. And probably not something Trump can trash. Though who knows? Click to enlarge.

The Trump regime borrowed a torture prison

MAGA media billioinaires and Bari Weiss, their bought and paid for stooge, tried to prevent you from seeing this 60 Minute segment about El Salvador's torture prison and the men sent there so Donald and Kristi Noem can look butch. Watch it here.

International rules against torture breaking down

Russia wants out of the European Convention for the Prevention of Torture and Inhuman or Degrading Punishment which it signed onto 1996. 

According to Radio Liberty (thanks to Google translate): 

Putin submitted to the state Duma a draft on the denunciation of the Convention against torture...

After withdrawing from the convention, Russia will no longer be obliged to admit international inspectors to its prisons. Complaints from Russian prisoners to the European Committee for the Prevention of Torture will no longer be considered. 

The United Nations Human Rights Monitoring Mission in Ukraine (HRMMU) has reported extensive Russian torture of captured Ukrainians.

“Almost every single one of the Ukrainian POWs we interviewed described how Russian servicepersons or officials tortured them during their captivity, using repeated beatings, electric shocks, threats of execution, prolonged stress positions and mock execution. Over half of them were subjected to sexual violence,” said Danielle Bell who heads HRMMU. “Most POWs also recounted the anguish of not being allowed to communicate with their families, and being deprived of adequate food and medical attention.” 

Although the United States has historically been allergic to international treaties which might subject acts by our citizens to international judgement, we signed the analogous United Nations Convention against torture in 1988 and ratified in 1994. 

I doubt somehow doubt that the Trump/Hegseth regime gives a damn about internationally recognized bars to torture. But one hopes most American citizens might.

Once again -- to remain human means to say NO!

Once upon a time -- when the New York Times revealed America's Vietnamese "allies" were torturing their enemies in "tiger cages," when photos revealed what US soldiers in Iraq were doing to prisoners at Abu Ghraib -- Erudite Partner and I would mutter to each other, when are they going to bring it home?

Yes, we knew that torture was all too prevalent in US prisons and jails, for example by Chicago police in this century. 

But local police malpractice and terror seemed a different thing than torture practiced on people who had been declared "the other" by the powers that be. 

But now we have that. 

My Erudite Partner Rebecca Gordon returns to the topic of her academic research in a current article for TomDispatch.

Everything Old Is New Again: The Trump Administration Revives Institutionalized Torture 

... in the age of Donald Trump, we face a government which is indeed willing to directly terrorize people in this country with the threat of torture (even if in a distant land). 

Every torture regime will identify a group or groups of people as “legitimate” targets. In the United States today, immigrants form just such a group, characterized by the Trump administration as either superhuman (“terrorists,” “monsters”) or subhuman (“vermin”). Super- or sub-, they are deemed unworthy of ordinary human rights.

But the fear generated by such threats of torture penetrates beyond those most immediately threatened, encouraging everyone else to comply with and bow down before the regime. Trump has indeed claimed that “the homegrowns are next.”

 

We face a test. How do we choose to respond to the barbarism of our authorities rooted in the fears of our neighbor citizens? We are not helpless.

... Those of us living in the United States of 2025 are already being called on to resist the centrifugal forces of isolation and mistreatment in the age of Trump. In this time of torture redux, small efforts to maintain social connections become real acts of resistance. We have already seen whole neighborhoods spontaneously resist ICE raids by pouring into the streets. That is one crucial kind of solidarity.  

I’d argue that anything we do today to maintain human connections — that smile at a grocery cashier, that phone call to an old friend, that little gathering with fellow knitters – is also an act of solidarity in such grim times. We will need them all in the days to come. 

Go read it all. 

Rendition returns

Erudite Partner points out: 

Trump Harvests Autocratic Powers Planted by Bush and Cheney

... It’s tempting to think of Donald Trump’s second term as a sui generis reign of lawlessness. But sadly, the federal government’s willingness to violate federal and international law with impunity didn’t begin with Trump. If anything, the present incumbent is harvesting a crop of autocratic powers from seeds planted by President George W. Bush and Vice-President Dick Cheney in those war on terror years following the attacks of September 11, 2001.  

... In those days of “enhanced interrogation,” I was already arguing that accepting such lawless behavior could well become an American habit. We might gradually learn, I suggested, to put up with any government measures as long as they theoretically kept us safe. And that indeed was the Bush administration’s promise: Let us do whatever we need to, over there on the “dark side,” and in return we promise to always keep you safe. In essence, the message was: there will be no more terrorist attacks if you allow us to torture people.

... One difference between the Bush-Cheney years and the Trump ones is that the attacks of September 11, 2001, represented a genuine and horrific emergency. Trump’s version of such an emergency, on the other hand, is entirely Trumped-up. He posits nothing short of an immigration “invasion” — in effect, a permanent 9/11 — that “has caused widespread chaos and suffering in our country over the last 4 years.” Or so his executive order “Declaring a National Emergency at the Southern Border of the United States” insists. To justify illegally deporting alleged members of Tren de Aragua and, in the future (if he has his way), many others, he has invented a totally imaginary war so that he can invoke the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, which was last used during World War II to justify the otherwise unjustifiable internment of another group of dehumanized people in this country: Japanese-Americans.

Donald Trump has his very own “black site” now...

Remembering the recent origins of this country's embrace of security theater and rendition to law-free torture as foreign policy should also remind us of the disasters that followed. After 9/11, the US fought two wars in other people's countries; killed massive numbers of Iraqis, Afghans, and US and allied military; and eventually was driven away and lost any enduring influence in those places for its pains. 

Trump is another disaster; we have chosen this one when we could have been expected to have our eyes open. When will we learn better? It's going to be a tough patch for America.

An abomination, not a mere embarrassment

Last night, I had terrible dreams of encroaching deaths and horrors. I am not the only one living with bad dreams

This morning I opened Facebook to this, from the Rev. Br. Richard Edward Helmer, Rector of the Episcopal Church of Our Savior in Mill Valley, California.

Beyond American Vulgarity
It is arguably very late to say something, but the glorified visage of the Secretary of Homeland Security standing in front of half-naked, deported, incarcerated prisoners who had no recourse to due process — incarcerated, I should add, in an overseas prison with no access to legal representation and completely voided of their rights — a prison bought and paid for with U.S. tax dollars…

…crossed the line for me from the all-too-familiar vulgarity of this administration into outright obscenity.

No cynical veneer of deterring illegal immigration or criminality holds when those in power glorify the treatment of basic human life and freedoms with no greater notice than did the “owners” of those caught in chattel slavery or, for that matter, the overseers of concentration camps.

This is a criminal administration for its utter contempt for human dignity and rights, for its corrupt anti-constitutional assumption and conflation of the roles of prosecutor, judge, and jury, and for its sheer bloody-mindedness when confronted with simple appeals for the truth. We are witnessing an abomination, not a mere embarrassment. All the more so because so many in this cabal lay claim to Christian faith as justification for their actions. There is nothing Christian about this. To say otherwise is blasphemy.

The bone-chilling truth is that this line, departing from all valued constitutional process that this government was sworn to uphold, puts all of us — citizen and immigrant alike — in danger. From abroad, reprisal and encouragement to every enemy of human dignity and freedom. And from within: If the rights of immigrants and asylum-seekers may be treated with such open and gleeful contempt by this presidency, so may the rights of our citizens. Some would say that may in fact may be the point. In which case I say we are already tumbling over the precipice.

Our work ahead could not be clearer. Wherever we are, whoever we are, we must be doubly-prepared to stand up, speak up, and take action to preserve dignity, rights, and freedoms while we still can. If we do, our children will thank us.

If we do not, they will never forgive us.

National shame shuffles along expensively

The outgoing Biden administration has managed to make a tiny bit of progress on cleansing the national shame which is the US gulag at Guantanamo.

Andy Worthington, who has stayed on top of our criminal travesty of justice, explains: 

In what will forever be remembered as a truly significant day in Guantánamo’s long and sordid history, the Biden administration has freed eleven Yemeni prisoners, flying them from Guantánamo to Oman to resume their lives after more than two decades without charge or trial in US custody; mostly at Guantánamo, but in some cases for several years previously in CIA “black sites.”

All eleven men had been held for between two and four years since they were unanimously approved for release by high-level US government review processes, and, in one outlying case, for 15 years.

A deal to release them in Oman had been arranged in October 2023, but had been cancelled at the last minute, when a plane was already on the runway, because of what was described, when the story broke last May, as the “political optics” of freeing them when the attacks in southern Israel had just taken place — although Carol Rosenberg, writing for the New York Times about the releases yesterday, suggested that “congressional objections led the Biden administration to abort the mission.”

Nobody who paid attention claims these guys had done anything except be brown Islamic men from a no-count country who got swept up in the national US spasm of vengeance after 9/11. 

Rosenberg describes the back story of our Cuban prison:

Guantánamo’s detention zone today is an emptier, quieter place than it once was.

The remaining 15 detainees are held in two prison buildings with cell space for about 250 prisoners.

The prison opened on Jan. 11, 2002, with the arrival of the first 20 detainees from Afghanistan. At its peak, in 2003, the operation had about 660 prisoners and more than 2,000 troops and civilians commanded by a two-star general. The detainees were mostly held in open-air-style cells on a bluff overlooking the water while the prisons were built.

The operation now has 800 troops and civilian contractors — 53 guards and other staff members for every detainee — and is run by a more junior officer, Col. Steven Kane.

It was always madness; at this point, the insanity is all that is left. And a few remaining prisoners who are tied up in legal proceedings that never advance because American civilian lawyers continued to argue, accurately, that their charges, even if justified, depend on information extracted by illegal torture.

Persevering in the good fight

When authoritarians are working to replace established ethical norms with the dictates of the Leader, some of the speed bumps they have to overcome are professional standards. Some people will refuse to play by new rules which violate what they've been taught is responsible -- right and righteous -- behavior. We saw plenty of that during the Trump presidency, notably even from some Trump-appointed judges when the sitting president tried, falsely, to claim he'd been defeated by non-existent election fraud.

Some professionals have been fighting the standards fight for decades. Erudite Partner, in her role as an academic ethicist, worked with professional psychologists during the so-called War on Terror to stigmatize the George W. Bush regime's cooptation of the psychological discipline. Psychologists committed abuses -- torture -- on inmates at our American gulag in Guantanamo. (This admitted torture is why those prisoners, some of them documented "bad guys," have never come to trial; the USofA screwed up, rendering proceedings at law almost impossible.)

Form a 2007 demonstration at an American Psychological Association convention

Psychologist Roy Eidelson reports that the American Psychological Association is still dodging setting effectual ethical standards for members who work with the government. He reports on

... approval of a set of wholly inadequate professional practice guidelines for operational psychology. If this domain is unfamiliar to you, operational psychologists are primarily involved in non-clinical activities linked to national security, national defense, and public safety. Their largest source of employment is the military-intelligence establishment, which includes the Department of Defense and the CIA.

Of particular concern from the standpoint of professional ethics, in some cases these psychologists are called upon to inflict harm, to dispense with informed consent, and to operate in a covert manner such that external oversight by professional boards becomes difficult or impossible. They’re eager to have the APA’s official blessing of this weaponization of the profession because it’s a step toward achieving greater recognition and legitimacy for this kind of work.

In light of the manifest misalignment between key features of operational psychology and the profession’s fundamental ethical principles, I believe the proposed guidelines should have been rejected outright, so as not to lend credence to these practices without sufficient discussion and debate about the profoundly consequential issues involved. 

But it’s worth pointing out that these guidelines deserved a flunking grade simply in comparison to other guidelines recently approved by the APA’s Council for other professional practice areas. For instance, both the guidelines for working with persons with disabilities (2022) and the guidelines for working with sexual minority persons (2021) are each over four-times the length of these vague, abstract, and bare-bones guidelines for operational psychology. Count me among those who find it hard to understand why appropriate guidelines for how to ethically support military-intelligence operations are apparently so much less complicated than guidance for psychologists engaged in other work....

He goes on to remind of past abuses:

What does it actually mean, for instance, to “balance” the government’s urgent demand for actionable intelligence against the human dignity of those suspected of having that information?

Let’s remember too that the military-intelligence establishment has itself engaged in a lot of wordsmithing designed to disguise uncomfortable truths. Most obviously, the CIA used “enhanced interrogation techniques” as a substitute term for a much more familiar one: “torture.” With a similar purpose, the Pentagon reduced the number of reported detainee suicide attempts at Guantanamo by officially reclassifying them as cases of “manipulative self-injurious behavior.” And the number of “juveniles” imprisoned at Guantanamo was decreased by arbitrarily adopting sixteen as the cut-off age—even though a juvenile according to U.S. and international law is someone under eighteen at the time of any alleged crime....

The "War on Terror" taught large elements of the national security state to lie baldly. That lying was the precursor of the recent mendacious Trump presidency. It still matters to call these lies out.

Professional standards aren't enough, unaccompanied by activism, to resist fascism, but they are one sometimes surprising element of the defense of civilization. 

What did Ron DeSantis do at Guantanamo?

So anti-woke Florida bully-boy Governor Ron DeSantis (an aspiring Republican presidential nominee) has thrown down with the view that Russia's attempt to erase Ukraine and Ukrainians is just a "territorial dispute." Apparently he fears Donald Trump's Putin-love will upstage him unless he goes along. Kind of pathetic, but common behavior from people who only punch down.

If DeSantis prevails in his bid to lead the GOPers, there's a detail in his biography that will probably get more attention. As a newly minted Navy legal officer in 2006, DeSantis got an education in punching down at the U.S. gulag at Guantanamo. He doesn't talk about it much, but as part of his self-presentation as stand-up military guy, it will certainly draw at least some scrutiny.

It's not at all clear what DeSantis did at America's Cuban prison. He was there at a particularly bad time, when, interrogators frustrated because their captives didn't provide intelligence about al Qaeda (because the prisoners didn't have any) turned to brutal methods. Prisoners responded with a hunger strike -- having no other recourse to assert their humanity, they became willing to starve themselves. Official accounts say DeSantis filled a very junior paper pusher role; this makes sense. But the Florida BullDog, a muckraking online pub, passes on a story from a released detainee which adds to some color to DeSantis' Guantanamo tour.

Mansoor Adayfi, formerly detainee #441 and also known as Abdul Rahman Ahmed, says JAG Officer Ron DeSantis observed, allowed and participated in illegal acts of torture to help put down a hunger strike in 2006 by dozens of detainees protesting their detention. DeSantis also covered up the torture, Adayfi says.

The Yemen-born Adayfi, held for 14 years without charges, was released in 2016 and flown to Serbia to start a new life after a review board determined he was not a threat to the U.S. He made his allegations about DeSantis in a Nov. 18 interview podcast of Eyes Left, hosted by U.S. Army veteran and anti-war activist Michael Prysner, a graduate of Florida Atlantic University.

“I saw a fucking handsome person who was coming. He said, ‘I’m here to ensure that you’re treated humanely.’ And we said, OK, this is our demand, you know. We’re not asking for much,” Adayfi said. He said DeSantis went on, “And if you have any problems, if you have any concerns, if you have…just talk to me.’ And you know we, we, we, we’re drowning in that place. I’m like, ‘Oh, this is cool.’ That person actually writing something. He will raise the concerns, but it was [a] piece of the game. What they were doing, they were, they were looking what’s [going to] hurt you more, to use against you.”

Adayfi, now 44, said DeSantis watched with amusement as he and other detainees were repeatedly force-fed Ensure, a “meal replacement” shake, through a nasal feeding tube pushed down their throats.

With considerable pride, Adayfi continues:

*So, when he approached me, I said this is the way we are treated. He said, ‘You should start to eat.’ …I threw up on his face. Literally on his face.”

True story? Only DeSantis knows and he's not answering questions. The image of a prisoner striving for some smidgen of dignity under intolerable conditions by throwing up in the face of his jailer stays with with me. 

DeSantis, during his time in Congress, consistently joined the Republican push to keep Guantanamo open despite most of its inmates being declared no danger to Americans, while denying access to American courts to the few who were actually charged with specific crimes.

Not all military lawyers sent to work at Guantanamo ended up punching down solely. For some, their attachment to law led to a different path. Colonel Moe Davis who was DeSantis' boss later left his post refusing to use evidence obtained through torture.

Cartoon credit: DonkeyHotey

Do the right thing, Joe

For two decades, a determined bunch of human rights activists and lawyers has been pushing to end this travesty of justice, the irrational and extra-legal consequence of our panic after 9/11.

Since Biden came to office, six prisoners have been released. 

Twenty men still held at our Caribbean gulag have been cleared for release -- determined to be no threat to the United States and charged with no crime. 

Eleven men, most of them charged with participating in planning the 9/11 attacks, are stuck in a phony "military commission" process which seems never to advance. Three more men are "forever prisoners" -- not charged, but our government plans to hold them forever. Most of this latter set were tortured while being held by the United States.

Thank you to the dedicated activists of CloseGuantanamo for keeping this struggle for more justice alive.

It's still going on ...

U.S. law is still being perverted to protect the Bush administration's torture regimen. And the result is the stuff of Alice-in-Wonderland.

The Supremes have decided, on a 7-2 vote, that, although the world has known without question since at least 2012 that the government tortured a Saudi citizen picked up in Pakistan while holding him in secret prisons in Thailand and Poland, somehow these crimes are covered by a "state secrets privilege." Therefore a Polish prosecutor cannot demand testimony from the rogue contractor-psychologists James Mitchell and John Jessen. Mitchell is so proud of what he did to Abu Zubaydah he wrote a book about it.

Only two Justices dissented from the absurd coverup. Justice Neil Gorsuch, writing in a dissent joined by Justice Sotomayor, explained what U.S. agents did to Abu Zubaydah:

They waterboarded Zubaydah at least 80 times, simulated live burials in coffins for hundreds of hours, and performed rectal exams designed to establish “total control over the detainee.” Six days into his ordeal, Zubaydah was sobbing, twitching, and hyperventilating. During one waterboarding session, Zubaydah became “completely unresponsive, with bubbles rising through his open, full mouth.” He became so compliant that he would prepare for waterboarding at the snap of a finger.

He continued:

... as embarrassing as these facts may be, there is no state secret here. This Court’s duty is to the rule of law and the search for truth. We should not let shame obscure our vision.

The majority did not agree.

Oh, and it has further become clear that Abu Zubaydah was an inconsequential bit player in al-Qaeda. His torture was an experiment -- a test of what can we do to an enemy over whom we have absolute power. 

He will remain a permanent prisoner of the United States, convicted of nothing and charged with nothing, because we don't want to 'fess up to what we did to him.

Friday cat blogging: meet Noosa

She sure looks like a close cousin to Janeway, doesn't she?

According to the Washington Post:

Hisham Bin Ali Bin Amor Sliti often struggles with headaches and bouts of loneliness. At Guantánamo, he took comfort in the stray animals that wandered into the camp, and in Slovakia he keeps a cat that he named Noosa. “I like animals,” he said. “Animals are like small children. Innocent.”

Mr. Sliti, originally from Tunisia, was dumped into George W. Bush's law-free prison at Guantanamo in 2002. By 2014, U.S.jailers had realized he was just some loser they'd been sold by crooks in Afghanistan. They dropped him off in Slovakia. He has understandable PTSD and no reliable means of support. And not much life. And, having crushed a working class guy who wanted to be a mechanic, the United States takes no further responsibility for him.

At least he has Noosa.

No easy exit

Isabel Wilkerson is not a linear writer. She offers her readers a non-linear, experiential text in Caste, exposing us to the meaning of the systemic classification of human beings in caste societies. The three such societies she focuses on and compares are our American polity, Nazi Germany, and Hindu India. This is a nearly 500 page book that immerses the reader in realities that hurt.

This is not a book for the squeamish. According to Wilkerson, in the United States a racialized caste system has rendered Black people the lowest among the low, a status so much part of the air we breathe that its accidents often pass by unmarked by both higher status people (mostly but not exclusively white) and even its Black subjects themselves. Unexamined, caste is just the way the world works. Under slavery, the caste system extracted value from the work of Black Africans through branding, whipping, torture, and rape; under Jim Crow, the freed people were subjected to dismembering and lynching; and today we practice mass incarceration and Derek Chauvin-policing.

And there's no escaping the U.S. caste system. There's hardly a professional class Black person who hasn't lived an incident such as what happened to rising political star Illinois State Senator Barack Obama who tells of being casually taken for a waiter at star-powered New York (white) media party.

She writes from her own experience of living with no refuge from Black caste status despite her journalistic acclaim and Pulitzer award.

Modern-day caste protocols are less often about overt attacks or conscious hostility and can be dispiritingly hard to fight. They are like the wind, powerful enough to knock you down but invisible as they go about their work. They are sustained by the muscle memory of relative rank and the expectations of how one interacts with others based on their place in the hierarchy. 

It's a form of hyper-vigilance, the entitlement of the dominant caste to step in and assert itself wherever it chooses, to monitor or dismiss those deemed beneath them as they see fit. It is not about luxury cars and watches, country clubs and private banks, but knowing without thinking that you are one up from another based in rules not set down in paper but reinforced in most every commercial, television show, or billboard, from boardrooms to newsrooms to gated subdivisions, to who gets killed first in the first half hour of a movie. 

This is the blindsiding banality of caste.

No reader of this book will come away thinking that the micro in the term micro-aggression means inconsequential. Not only the terrible history of oppression, but also a current reality of oblivious suppression is Wilkerson's "origins of our discontents."

And here we are in the era of the full-on fascist GOP and dithering Dems (on their bad days). Wilkerson shows how durable and resilient the racial caste system remains. The demographic mix in the country is changing. Will that change undermine the system?

Wilkerson is appropriately dubious, yet tries to be hopeful.

Without an enlightened recognition of the price we all pay for a caste system, the hierarchy will likely shape-shift as it has in the past to ensure that the structure remains intact. The definition of whiteness could well expand to confer honorary whiteness to those on the border -- the lightest skinned people of Asian or Latino descent or biracial people with a white parent, for instance -- to increase the ranks of the dominant caste.

... None of us chose the circumstances of our birth. We had nothing to do with having been born into privilege or under stigma. We have everything to do with what we do with our God-given talents and how we treat others in our species from this day forward. ...

(I might add also how we treat other species as well.)

This book is a long, harrowing journey. So is the struggle for a kinder society in which it is easier for all men and women to be good.

Boasting of torture

Warning: this story is stomach turning.

Former Navy SEAL Eddie Gallagher is Donald Trump's kind of guy. He was tried in a military court for stabbing a severely injured ISIS prisoner in the neck and got off on that particular charge. But he was convicted, among other misdeeds, of posing with the corpse. [See below] The former president was easily convinced this was just the sort of behavior he wanted in the nation's fighting forces. He supported Gallagher and eventually gave him a broad pardon.

The Navy didn't want its guys running around without discipline, so it tried various measures within its jurisdiction to mark that Gallagher had crossed a line. Trump didn't like that either. The affair bounced around the chain of command, eventually leading to Trump's own chosen Navy Secretary getting booted.

At Task and Purpose, Jeff Schogol reports on Gallagher's current boasts, now that he's off the legal hook. 

... Gallagher has told “The Line” [a podcast] that the SEALs were not tending to the fighter’s injuries; rather, they decided to conduct “medical treatment on him until he’s gone.” 

“I mean, he was going to die, regardless,” Gallagher said. “We weren’t taking any prisoners." 

He also claimed that every member of his platoon, including one SEAL who later reportedly described Gallagher as “evil” to investigators, all agreed to torture the ISIS fighter to death. 

“Everybody knew what was going on,” Gallagher said. “It’s the only truthful thing to this whole process; and then the rest of it just is like a bunch of contorted lies to, like, pin that whole scenario on me.” 

“I didn’t stab him,” Gallagher continued. “I didn’t stab that dude. That dude died from all the medical treatments that were done – and there was plenty of medical treatments that were done to him.”

We can only hope that Gallagher is boasting about torturing the prisoner to amp up his right-wing notoriety. He's found a sweet grift, being the right's favorite war criminal. Though the whole platoon is pictured here, we know some of them turned Gallagher in and called him "freaking evil."

These stories from the forever wars keep sending me back to the story of the U.S. troops who liberated the Nazi concentration camp at Dachau. Seeing the terrible stacks of prisoner bodies everywhere, their first impulse was simply to shoot every German in sight. But officers made them stop, insisted the German commanders get a trial with explicit evidence and defense lawyers -- and then quickly hanged the men convicted. This proceeding set the model for the better known Nuremberg trials. 

Warriors aren't angels but they need not be allowed to become devils either.

Torture continues

Erudite Partner takes on the corrosive reality that impunity for torturers has embedded this abuse in our government's routine assaults on vulnerable people.

If one administration can get away with confining detainees in coffin-like boxes and torturing them in myriad other ways, why shouldn’t a later one go unpunished for, to take but one example, putting migrant children in cages?

L.A. Progressive

The Obama administration chose to allow torturers to walk free, even promoted some -- is it any surprise that a truly vicious executive would revel in its power to destroy human lives without legal limit? Here we are.

Some battles must be fought over and over

Erudite Partner recounts how last month members of an organized professional association stood up for ethical conduct within their discipline. Psychologists held out against expedient conformity with the wishes of leaders in authority, a tough choice too often demanded of all of us in these times.

Juan Cole published her story. She begins ...:

No one, not Psychologists or Supreme Court Justices, should be Helping with Gov’t TortureSometimes the good guys do win. That’s what happened on August 8th in San Francisco when the Council of Representatives of the American Psychological Association (APA) decided to extend a policy keeping its members out of the U.S. detention center at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

The APA’s decision is important — and not just symbolically. Today we have a president who has promised to bring back torture and “load up” Guantánamo “with some bad dudes.” When healing professionals refuse to work there, they are standing up for human rights and against torture.

It wasn’t always so. In the early days of Guantánamo, military psychologists contributed to detainee interrogations there. It was for Guantánamo that Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld approved multiple torture methods, including among others excruciating stress positions, prolonged isolation, sensory deprivation, and enforced nudity. Military psychologists advised on which techniques would take advantage of the weaknesses of individual detainees. And it was two psychologists, one an APA member, who designed the CIA’s whole “enhanced interrogation program.” ...

Read it all at the link.

The photo is from 2007 when APA members demonstrated in San Francisco outside their association's annual meeting, demanding psychologists get out of Dick Cheney's gulag.

Their cries echo to the heavens ...

The investigative reporting group ProPublica provides this audio from within a Border Patrol detention facility. Whoever made and smuggled out the recording passed it to civil rights attorney Jennifer Harbury -- a name long familiar to many North Americans concerned with human rights in Central America. Harbury's Guatemalan husband was tortured to death in his home country in the 1980s by paid CIA informants.

Those of us in the US who worked for justice and peace in the Americas have always feared the misdeeds of the United States would come home. They have -- and are visited on the children.

The good solider Haspel testified

Gina Haspel had her public confirmation hearing for the position of CIA Director before the Senate Intelligence Committee yesterday. She's a career professional officer who headed up a torture site in Thailand during the GW Bush era and later had a leading role in ordering the destruction of the videotapes that showed what her agency did to detainees.

One of the oddest things about her nomination to such a public role is that the CIA refuses to declassify most details of her career (claiming agents/assets might be outed). So we are left without any real information about what she's done/her qualifications. The CIA says she's great. It seems to me that in a democracy citizens who are not Senators deserve to know more than that her agency likes her -- a lot more.

Erudite Partner did commentary during the hearing for Pacifica station KPFA; after all, torture is her subject. Here's the audio.

The following reflections are mine, not the resident expert's.

• The Democratic Senators' questions seemed sharper than they often have been in such settings. New Mexico's Martin Heinrich nailed the key issue, to my way of thinking:

  “I know you believed it was legal... ... I want to trust that you have the moral compass you said you have. You're giving very legalistic answers to very moral questions.”

• Nothing I heard suggests Haspel has real qualms about the torture program. She's not prepared to say torture didn't serve the project of defeating terrorist enemies -- though the 6000 page classified Senate Intelligence Committee report apparently came to that conclusion.

  “We got valuable information from debriefing of al-Qaeda detainees,” she told Sen. Kamala D. Harris (D-Calif.). “I don’t think it’s knowable whether interrogation techniques played a role in that.”

• She said she wouldn't restart the torture program. It was hard to tell whether she was promising to stand up to the bully in the White House. (Trump thinks we didn't torture enough.) She seemed to equivocate.

  “No one should get credit for simply agreeing to follow the law. That’s the least we should expect from any nominee and certainly the director of the CIA,” [Senator Mark] Warner told Haspel ...

• Perhaps inevitably since we're not allowed to know anything about her accomplishments, she heavily emphasized her identification with the Agency.

  Haspel cited her support from the rank and file in the agency, noting that “they know that I don’t need time to learn the business of what CIA does. ... I know CIA like the back of my hand,” she said. “I know them, I know the threats we face, and I know what we need to be successful in our mission.”

She's such an unfamiliar, opaque figure that I am allowing myself luxury of trying to form a picture of what sort of person she revealed herself to be. (Usually one has more to go on than one hearing, but that's the situation in which we find ourselves.)

I think she's one smart, tough woman who came up wanting to be a warrior, a hero. There's weren't a huge number of venues for a woman with such an ambition when she joined the CIA in 1985. In the Agency, she found her tribe, her vocation where she could fulfill her ambition. She was very good at whatever they threw at her. She seems to equate loyalty to the Agency with loyalty the people of the United States -- without any inkling that there might be any daylight between those two goods. Perhaps that's inevitable in someone whose life has cloistered her within a dangerous, secret, social niche. It hardly seems good preparation to be anything more than a good soldier. But the job of CIA Director necessarily requires some understanding of a messy civilian society -- a society whose preservation is ultimately the only reason that her warrior caste is privileged to exist.

I don't know if she'll be confirmed; the White House apparently had to persuade her not to back out of the confirmation process last week.

The hearing didn't win any trust from me (not that this was ever likely.) A good soldier is a dangerous weapon when the Commander in Chief cares not a fig for law, decency, or morals.

Letter to some editors

Dear Washington Post,

Why so mealy-mouthed? The nomination of Gina Haspel to be director of the Central Intelligence Agency has once again raised awareness of the torture practices the George W. Bush regime instigated, allowed, and covered for in the wars of the '00s. Nobody disputes that Haspel ran one of the "black sites" where the CIA literally taught itself how to torture, using the body of Abu Zubaydah. Nobody disputes that she dispatched the order to destroy video tapes of waterboarding, though the CIA contends she was just following orders (no shit, that's how this action is discussed.)

But over and over, the Washington Post writes around what all the world calls by its name: torture. Some samples:

• "techniques often referred to as torture"

• "[Senator Rand] Paul also intends to vote no because of her role in harsh interrogations during the Bush administration."

The debate is over. The torture apologists lost. The US tortured and has been rightly condemned around the world. Even that careful Senator Diane Feinstein calls what we were doing "torture."

Call it what is was. Get real with your "Democracy Dies in Darkness" stuff. Democracy dies when truth is obscured by phony polite obfuscations.

Yours sincerely,

A concerned citizen

The house is still on fire

Yesterday Erudite Partner (that's Rebecca Gordon) was asked to speak at one session of a teach-in commemorating Dr. Martin Luther King's murder, organized by the Office of Diversity Engagement and Community Outreach at the University of San Francisco where she teaches. Her distinguished co-panelist was Professor James Lance Taylor. EP has allowed me to share her talk here.

What is the legacy of Dr. King's vision of justice in 2018?

Some years ago, I attended a fundraising banquet for a local progressive foundation. Harry Belafonte was the keynote speaker, and he told this story about a conversation he'd had with Dr. King, shortly before he was murdered. He told Mr. Belafonte that he had spent his life working to get his people into a house. Only lately had he fully realized that the house itself was on fire.

That house, of course, was full membership, as full human beings, in U.S. society. And the flames consuming it? What Dr. King called the triple evils of poverty, racism and militarism. If he were with us today, he would very likely add a fourth to this interlocking trio of systems -- the disastrous changes to the Earth's climate that result from an unfettered capitalism that creates great wealth for the few and poverty for the many, a poverty made differentially worse by the workings of racism, all of it enforced by military impositions abroad and police forces at home that in some places act more like an occupying army.

In many ways, things look pretty bleak in the United States of 2018. We are still fighting imperial wars. No longer against Vietnam, a war that Dr. King called out in his famous “A Time to Break Silence” speech, in which he said that the United States was at that time the greatest purveyor of violence in the world. That, unfortunately is even more true than it was in 1968. Today our wars extend throughout the Middle East, Central Asia, and Africa. Collaborating with Saudi Arabia, the U.S. is abetting a famine in Yemen. We have soldiers fighting in Iraq, Syria, and Afghanistan, along with more-or-less secret deployments in Sudan, Mali, Djibouti, and Niger. We have almost four times as many military bases around the world as states in the union.

But there are signs of hope, movements growing that very much reflect Dr. King's vision of justice. When Alicia Garza, Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and thousands of other young leaders, insist that Black Lives Matter, you can hear the echoes of the sanitation workers striking in Selma, Alabama in 1968, carrying signs proclaiming, “I am a man.” One difference is that today our conception of humanity is no longer coextensive with manhood. A movement led by queer women can galvanize the nation. This is a change from the days when Bayard Rustin, who with A. Phillip Randolph organized the 1963 March on Washington, had to hide his gay humanity to claim his Black humanity.

Things have changed, but the message has only deepened: that a Black life is a human life, and that human lives -- and respect for those who live them -- matter.

While many of the most inspiring younger people of color who are leading my movements are conscious anti-capitalists, they are not pure materialists. Just as Dr. King's practice of nonviolent direct action was rooted in a radical Christianity that insisted on the full humanity of all of us, all of us made in the image of the divine, and just as the Black theologian James Cone insisted that the message of the gospel in 1968 was Black Power, so too, today's movements of young people of color are infused with spiritual power. Their spirituality may not be that of the Black evangelical churches, but it is an unashamed embrace of spiritual practices as central to their political work. This is the practice, for example, of the Movement Strategy Center in Oakland, whose projects like “Love with Power” promote the building of the beloved community through tenacious organizing and practices of spirit.

And there's a lot to do, if we are to build that community, because the house is still on fire, and if anything, the fire is burning brighter than ever in this country. Legal segregation, legal discrimination are dead. But institutional racism lives on, and in many ways is more difficult to combat, because the target is less clear. The Civil Rights movement won great legal victories in the 1950's and 60's -- Brown v. Board of Education, the passage of the Civil Rights and Voting Rights Acts, but those victories have proved partial, largely because of a series of court actions that have weakened their effects.

Today's public schools are as segregated as ever -- in large part because of the decision in a 1971 case, Swann v. Charlotte-Mecklenburg Board of Education. The courts ruled that it was illegal to bus students across school district lines in order to achieve integration. This gave even more impetus to white families to leave the cities for suburbs where they could form separate districts to keep Black children out of their schools. Similarly courts have eviscerated the anti-discrimination provisions of the Civil Right Act by requiring plaintiffs to demonstrate not that there is a pattern of discrimination, say in employment or college admissions, but that the people doing the hiring or admitting demonstrate personal, intentional prejudice in their decisions. Despite the resurgence of white nationalist terror, most white people's racism still operates at the level of unconscious bias, which makes it very hard to prove discrimination. And I don't have to tell you what the Supreme Court has done to the Voting Rights Act, with Chief Justice Roberts proclaiming that the states that historically prevented Black people from voting have fixed their problems and no longer need oversight. Today's ID requirements in those states and intimidation are the new poll taxes and literacy tests.

Sadly, many of those who've argued in the courts -- or for anti-affirmative action ballot measures around the country -- have relied on a misinterpretation of a line from Dr. King's speech at the 1963 march on Washington -- his wish that his children might be judged “not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.” This desire has been twisted to suggest that race doesn't matter, that people are simply lonely individuals, unconnected to the families and communities that help form us. The corollary, of course, is that racism can only be dismantled if we refuse to recognize race. But pretending that everyone has an equal chance doesn't make it so. And it doesn't begin to address the larger problem in that burning house -- the fact that capitalism forces all of us to want “chances” at very few gold rings that can only ever belong to the wealthiest few.

The house is still on fire.

The rest of the country is finally waking up to something that Black and brown communities have known for decades: this country imprisons a larger percentage of our population, and a larger number of human beings, than any other country in the world. And those prisons are sites of terror and torture -- beatings, electrical attacks, the horror of solitary confinement, and the insane cruelty of “botched” executions.

My own work for the last 16 years -- almost since September 11, 2001 -- has focused on torture and war crimes in the course of the so-called “war on terror.” From the very beginning, torture has been racialized. Only particular bodies are legitimate targets for torture. For this country, both in today's wars and historically, those bodies have been black and brown. The U.S. didn't start torturing people on September 12th. We'd already been at it for centuries, and the practice is among the armaments that keep Dr. King's triple evils alive. The more deeply I looked at the history of torture in this country, the clearer it became that torture and racism are tied at the root.

From before the United States existed, Black bodies have been legitimate targets for torture. Institutionalized abuses that were ordinary practice among slaveholders - whipping, shackling, branding and other mutilations - were both common and legal. Nor were such practices incidental to the institution of chattel slavery. Rather, they were central to slavery's fundamental rationale - the belief that enslaved African beings were not entirely human.

Edmund Morgan's American Slavery, American Freedom helped me to understand more deeply why slavery in this country became entwined with torture from the very beginning. The book takes the colony of Virginia as a case study for the role of slavery in the founding of the United States. Morgan explains the labor economics of Virginia's cash crop - tobacco. Farming it is a labor-intensive business, and in the early days of Virginia, labor was in short supply. The first human imports were indentured servants from England. Some came voluntarily, exchanging seven years' labor for the price of their passage. Others were swept from the streets of England's cities, or culled from her prisons, and brought against their will. In either case, they received the same deal - seven years of work, in return for freedom, and in many cases a piece of land to farm.

When the first enslaved Africans began to arrive, they were offered no such deal. They weren't going to get freedom and a plot of land after seven years, or seventeen. In fact, they and their children, and their children's children could expect only lives of enslavement. The Virginian farmers quickly discovered that without any incentive on offer, there was only one way to get these people to work - by causing them terrible pain. So torture became an everyday practice among slaveholders.

In The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism, Edward E. Baptiste describes how cotton farmers used the “pushing system,” an organized technology of cruelty, to get the maximum labor possible from enslaved people. It was, he says, “a system that extracted more work by using oppressively direct supervision combined with torture." Baptiste continues,

In the context of the pushing system, the whip was as important to making cotton grow as sunshine and rain…. [I]n 1849 a migrating North Carolina planter hired a “Mississippi overseer” to ensure that his “hands” would be “followed up from day break until dark as is the custom here.” The overseer would drive each “fore row” in a vast and easily surveyed field, and he would “whip up” those who fell behind. All that pushing, the owner calculated, would force “my negroes [to do] twice as much here as negroes generally do in N.C.”

This human technology powered by the whip created productivity increases that rivaled anything achieved by the steam-powered machines of the industrial revolution, as people desperate to evade the lash developed new techniques for planting, hoeing, and picking cotton. Between 1801 and 1840, the average amount of cotton picked each day rose from 28 pounds to as much as 341 pounds per person.

That torture continued with the state-sanctioned practice of lynching, and continues today in our jails and prisons.

The house is still on fire.

But Dr. King's legacy lives on here, and around the world. It lives on in Black Lives Matter, in Colorlines and Color of Change, in Critical Resistance, Left Roots, Right to the City, Causa Justa, and the thousands of other local and national organizations struggling to birth the beloved community. It lives on in the scholarship of Michelle Alexander and Naomi Murakawa, who challenge mass incarceration, and the very act of locking human beings up in the cages we call prisons.

And it lives on in the place that many people have called the world's largest open-air prison -- the Gaza strip in the Middle East. Just under 2 million Palestinians live in Gaza, and most of them cannot leave. Today we mark the 50th anniversary of the catastrophe of Dr. King's murder. In a few weeks, Palestinians will mark the 70th anniversary of the Naqba -- what for them was the catastrophe of 1948, in which their parents and grandparents lost their homes in what is now the land of Israel. How are they observing it? With a massive civil campaign of nonviolent direct action. Thousands, men, women, and children, have begun camping near the electrified fence that separates Gaza from Israel, insisting on their humanity, their human desire for justice. Their nonviolent action has been met -- as Dr. King was met -- with violence. Eighteen have been killed by Israeli soldiers and many more wounded. But still they carry on that legacy of Dr. King's nonviolent action, still they demonstrate in their resolve, their humanity. Can we do any less?

When Dr. King told Harry Belafonte about the burning house, Belafonte asked him, “Well what are you going to do about it?”

“I guess we'll have become firemen,” said Dr. King.

The house is still on fire. We must all become firefighters.