Turning treatment topsy-turvy: Psychologists do not take the Hippocratic oath. Perhaps that needs to be changed. Now.

Two Spokane psychologists are the focus of a congressional inquiry into the use of harsh techniques to interrogate terrorist suspects in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other secret military and CIA detention centers.

In an article published last week, the online magazine Salon.com identified psychologists James E. Mitchell and John Bruce Jessen as key developers of the interrogation program – which the magazine said was linked to the CIA and likely violated the Geneva Conventions against the torture and mistreatment of prisoners.

The interrogation methods, according to a recently declassified Pentagon report reviewed by The Spokesman-Review, are “reverse engineering” of techniques taught in the military’s SERE program, set up to train U.S. special forces and flight crews in the principles of Survival, Evasion, Resistance and Escape.

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The Spokane psychologists’ names surfaced after Sen. Carl Levin, D-Michigan, chairman of the Senate Armed Services Committee, told the Pentagon in May not to destroy any documents mentioning them or their consulting firm, Mitchell Jessen & Associates.

The Department of Defense responded by sending a “document preservation” order on May 15 to the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and other top Pentagon officials, according to Salon.com.

Levin’s Senate investigation will cast a new spotlight on the psychologists’ work and controversial human rights abuses in the interrogation program.

“It’s an issue he’s been interested in for quite awhile,” said Dave Pollock, a spokesman for Levin in Washington, D.C. The armed services committee isn’t ready to release additional details about the scope of its investigation, Pollock told the newspaper this week.

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The SERE program, established after the Korean War, studied the psychological reaction of humans to warfare and captivity and is a “storehouse of knowledge” about coercive methods of interrogation, according to a July 2005 article by reporter Jane Mayer of The New Yorker.

Mayer’s article, titled “The Experiment,” described how the military began to use SERE psychologists for advice on how to question suspected terrorists after the September 11 attacks.

The New Yorker article was among the first to describe in detail how teams of “non-treating” psychiatrists and psychologists, called Behavioral Science Consultation Teams or “biscuits” in military language, were used at Guantanamo, the detention site established in January 2002 to hold “suspected enemy combatants” in the war on terror. Those teams are trained in SERE methods, the article said. One source told the New Yorker that the teams “took good knowledge and used it in a bad way.”

Many of the coercive techniques fit the international description of torture, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations Commission on Human Rights.

The recently declassified Pentagon report, considered a military secret last year but made public in May by the Inspector General of the Defense Department, confirms that the SERE techniques were “reverse engineered” in 2002 for use against suspected al-Qaeda loyalists in Guantanamo, Iraq, Afghanistan and other CIA “black,” or secret, detention centers. Article

That death squads (in all but name) were considered an imperative is bad enough (such as the Task Force 88 story mentioned here June 14). The pendulum Rummy, et al. pinned at the far edge of its travel may be swinging back from banana republicanism.

Almost six years after the worst attack ever on U.S. soil, special operations commanders believe that simply killing terrorists will not win a war against an ideologically motivated enemy.

That view is reflected in a series of transitions in special operations leadership posts. New senior officers are expected to give greater weight to an indirect approach to warfare, a slow and disciplined process that calls for supporting groups or nations willing to back U.S. interests.

Former Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld turned special operations forces into a “giant killing machine,” said Douglas Macgregor, a former Army colonel and frequent critic of the Defense Department.

Now, with Rumsfeld gone and Navy Vice Adm. Eric Olson about to take control of U.S. Special Operations Command (SOCOM), Macgregor anticipates a return to the fundamentals drilled into Army Green Berets, Navy SEALs and other specially trained troops.

“The emphasis will be on, ‘If you have to kill someone, then for God’s sakes, kill the right people,”‘ Macgregor said. “In most cases, you’re not going to have to kill people and that’s the great virtue of special operations. That’s been lost over the last several years.” Article

A somewhat related overview of the inherent necrotics of hegemonism and the affects of the dead weight of overstuffed and exorbitant militarism squatting on the chest of the body politic.

From one who knows whereof he speaks, John Dean:

Vice President Dick Cheney has regularly claimed that he is above the law, but until recently he has not offered any explanation of why.

In fact, it is becoming increasingly difficult to find a law that Cheney believes does apply to him, whether that law be major and minor.…

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Washington insiders have long understood that Cheney’s power stems from his knowledge of the way the White House and the Office of the President operate. This is knowledge he acquired as President Ford’s Chief of Staff. With Bush’s consent, much of the paper flow of the White House which heads up the chain of command toward the President goes through Cheney’s office. In addition, Cheney’s staff reaches down into the executive bureaucracy to shape the debate before it reaches the White House.

Those with whom I have spoken have serious doubt that Bush and the White House staff really knows what Cheney is doing, why he is doing it, or how he is doing it. From the outset of this administration, Cheney has been instrumental in placing people loyal to him throughout the Executive Branch. This is not to say that Bush is not “the decider,” for he is, but by shaping the debate and controlling the paper flow, Cheney decides what the decider will decide.

It has long been apparent that Cheney’s genius is that he lets George W. Bush get out of bed every morning actually believing he is the President. In fact, his presidency is run by the President of the Senate, for Cheney is its true center of gravity. That fact has become more apparent with every passing year of this presidency, and anyone who thinks otherwise has truly “misunderestimated” our nominal president and his vice president. Article

Analysis du jour:

…the term “Islamofascism” was not coined for nothing. It invites us to see a big part of the Islamic world as a natural extension of Nazism. Saddam Hussein, who was hardly an Islamist, and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad, who is, are often described as natural successors to Adolf Hitler. And European weakness, not to mention the “treason” of its liberal scribes, paving the way to an Islamist conquest of Europe (”Eurabia”) is seen as a ghastly echo of the appeasement of the Nazi threat.

Revolutionary Islamism is undoubtedly dangerous and bloody. Yet analogies with the Third Reich, although highly effective as a way to denounce people with whose views one disagrees, are usually false. No Islamist armies are about to march into Europe - indeed, most victims of Revolutionary Islamism live in the Middle East, not in Europe - and Ahmadinejad, his nasty rhetoric notwithstanding, does not have a fraction of Hitler’s power.

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If it were really true that the fundamental existence of our democratic Western world were about to be destroyed by an Islamist revolution, it would only make sense to seek protection in the full force of the U.S. informal empire. But if one sees our current problems in less apocalyptic terms, then another kind of trahison des clercs (treason of the intellectuals) comes into view: the blind cheering-on of a sometimes foolish military power embarked on unnecessary wars that cost more lives than they were intended to save. Article

The endgame of the woebegone G. Walker administration’s “my way or the highway” claptrap: a traffic-choked highway. Recovering what has been squandered and lost will take years, if not decades.

Global opinion of the US continues to plummet thanks to the foreign policies of President George W. Bush, while the image of other major powers such as Russia and China are also taking a battering, according to the world’s most comprehensive assessment of global opinion.

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In a press conference launching the report, former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright and co-chair of Pew Research Centre said the survey indicated a breakdown in the international system and the growth of “nihilism” among the global citizenry.

“This is not an optimistic report,” Dr Albright said.

“It isn’t just the US being criticised, it’s the Russians and the Chinese.”

She said the numbers indicated the world was lacking “significant leadership.

Unease over US foreign policy has grown among its major allies, the survey says. While 25 of the 47 countries polled expressed a positive opinion of the US, the survey says the ratings have continued to fall since 2002, with the US’s image declining in most parts of the world.

It has dropped from 75 per cent favourable in Britain in 2002 to 51 per cent now; from 60per cent to 30 per cent in Germany; and from 64 per cent to 56 per cent in Mexico.

“The US image remains abysmal in most Muslim countries and in the Middle East and Asia,” the Pew report says.

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Pew head Andrew Kohut said: “Even though there is a mixed view of the United States around the world, there is increasing disapproval of the principal cornerstones of our foreign policy.” Article

SCOTUS observed — Stanford Law Professor Pam Karlan:

“…if this is the birth of a new constitutional era, all I say is what an ugly baby. Source

Keep in mind that there is a far from remote possibility of another court appointment within the timeframe of G. Walker’s remaining months, and an almost 100% certainty of one, two or even three vacancies during the following adminsitration.