It spreads.
(CBS/ AP) Soldiers from a Colorado unit accused in nearly a dozen slayings since returning home – including a couple gunned down as they put up a garage sale sign – could be showing a hostility fueled by intense combat in Iraq, where the troops suffered heavy losses and told of witnessing war crimes, the military said Wednesday.
Well, Duh.
Via Pulse. An article- Palestine: to exist is to resist in Therapy Today, the monthly journal of the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy (BACP) was about the psychological trauma inflicted on Palestinians, with emphasis on children.
Pulse goes on- Under pressure from supporters of the Zionist state of Israel the editor, Sarah Browne pulled the article from their web page yesterday. Seemingly this pressure was a phone call telling them “that they’d find out they’d been very unwise to publish such a one-sided piece etc” and a couple of emails.
It might be worth email her saying that caving in to such pressure and withdrawing such an accurate piece does not serve the best interests of BACP members. (Thanks to Ian for this).
Her email address is: sarah.browne at bacp.co.uk
To me this is pure thuggism and censorship, a nation causes this suffering then bullies anyone who talks about it in an attempt to silence them, supposing if their victim’s death and/or suffering goes unacknowledged it does not exist and they can continue doing it. It is curious how people who think of themselves as liberal support Israel, censorship is a liberal thing now? This at the same time Haaretz is publishing stories detailing the racial extermination culture of the IDF.
Below the fold is the article retrieved from google cache.
“…as I say, I think it’s important that Jewish people who have a public profile, that we speak out to say that this is not being done in our name. I think that Israel has an idea of itself as being noble. Israeli people have an idea of themselves as being noble. When you attack somebody but you have this idea of yourself that you’re the good guy and you think that well, how can this be? I’m the good guy and I’m killing these people, and what you do is you blame the people that you killed and you hear all the time from Israeli spokespeople that they are angry with the people they have murdered for making them murder them.
And it is the foulest..kind of ..it is the psychology of the murderer, it is the psychology of the rapist, it is the psychology of the bully. That’s what Israel is in this situation.”
“People are horrified. They are frightened of being exposed. They don’t know how to go on,” said a Boston-area psychologist, cited in an interesting story by Svea Herbst of Reuters: “Many duped investors have been left with a sense of betrayal so strong that it will cause severe psychological scars, said Dr. James Grubman, a psychologist who counsels wealthy families in the Boston area struggling with the emotional issues of having money.”
Maybe if I get a paypal button we could all just pull together, collect some money and help these poor, poor lambs. Even if they don’t lose any money, they need help (is mo’ money, mo’ problems on his card?) . C’mon people, therapy doesn’t pay for itself!
[Note to self- Best scam evah! Treating rich idiots for being rich, why did I not become a psychologist? Dammit!]
Check his site –Family Wealth Consulting, absolute genius!
Dr. Jim Grubman of FamilyWealth Consulting works with families of wealth, family businesses, and the advisors who serve them. Using skills developed as a psychologist for over 30 years, he helps individuals and families understand and overcome the natural dilemmas of acquired or inherited wealth. He also teaches, trains, and collaborates with the many important advisors in clients’ lives. The goal – to help those with good fortune achieve their greatest potential.
Pass the tissues, I’m overcome (steady).
Against a leadership that spun, lied and collaborated with the Bush regime the membership voted 58.8% against being involved in the torture state. Full press release here @ Stephen Soldz’s blog. But as Valtin @ Invictus writes-
Insurgent Psychologists Win Key Anti-Torture Vote (excerpts)
One thing the resolution does not mean is an immediate pullout of psychologists from sites where human rights violations take place. Psychologists like U.S. Army Lieutenant Colonel Diane M. Zierhoffer, a former but now resigned APA member, still staff the Behavioral Science Consultation Teams (BSCT) at Guantanamo and elsewhere. Lt. Col. Zierhoffer exercised her Fifth Amendment rights not to answer questions about her participation in the interrogation of controversial “child soldier” Guantanamo prisoner Mohammad Jawad. Her refusal to answer questions about her actions — Zierhoffer is accused of signing off on keeping Jawad in solitary confinement, despite his mental deterioration — was widely noted and condemned…
It is now incumbent upon APA as an organization to implement the policy voted upon by a notable majority of their membership via free election. The APA must notify all relevant parties — the Pentagon, the President, the CIA — that it is now the position of the APA that psychologists not be utilized at settings where detainees are not allowed rights such as habeas corpus, and where abusive conditions of detention and coercive interrogation are well documented.
More, the APA should communicate the new policy statement broadly to media, legislators and the public. This APA has previously promised to do. They must not be allowed to bury the will of the APA membership. Members who have been withholding their dues in protest of APA policy should wait to see if APA has any real intention of implementing this new policy.
I suspect that APA will continue to procrastinate, as they have done with the so-called ethics casebook called for multiple times over the years (last at the 2007 APA convention). (The deadline for submissions of suggestions for such an ethics casebook was recently extended until the end of 2008.)
The reason for all the delays? The APA is deeply enmeshed in the governmental apparatus of military and intelligence organizations, while also serving varied private consultation and “scientific” organizations, and academia, all under the auspices of serving the national security state. Hence, APA belongs to a wide-ranging set of special interests, which forms an extremely formidable opposition to those who would fundamentally change the policies and personnel responsible for the institution of a world-wide network of secret prisons and institutionalized torture.
For the first time, the top commander of detention operations at Guantanamo has confirmed the existence of the mysterious Camp 7. In an interview with The Associated Press, Rear Adm. Mark Buzby also provided a few details about the maximum-security lockup. He described it as a maximum security facility that was already built when President Bush announced in September 2006 that 14 high-value terrorism suspects had been transferred from CIA secret detention facilities to Guantanamo. An additional detainee, Abd al-Hadi al-Iraqi, arrived last April. “They went straight into that facility,” Buzby said.Buzby, who heads all military detention operations on Guantanamo, said he controls Camp 7, but would not discuss whether the CIA might still be talking with the high-value detainees.Paul Rester, the military’s chief interrogator at Guantanamo, told AP he has been interviewing one of the Camp 7 detainees and that others may be interrogated, depending on intelligence needs.But other key military commanders on the base have been told to leave Camp 7 to others. “Not everybody, even within the Joint Task Force, has access or even knowledge of where Camp 7 is,” said Army Col. Bruce Vargo. As commander of the military’s Joint Detention Group at Guantanamo, Vargo is responsible for the camps holding 260 detainees. But not for Camp 7.Red Cross representatives have visited Camp 7 and all the other detention facilities at Guantanamo, confirmed Geoff Loane, head of the humanitarian organization’s delegation in Washington. He declined to give details.
The JTF may not get much action down Camp 7 way but they do have a camp magazine to enjoy. The Wire (not the excellent TV show) is Gitmo’s military produced lifestyle supplement (in pdf)! Have a browse through the archives, this January’s edition (ps. typo! Someone tell the military affairs office they’ve put this years mags under 2007) had a touching article in tribute to Martin Luther King and -as with much of the media- completely ‘neglect’ to mention his anti-war & economic justice work, well you can only take irony so far…
Also in this months jam packed issue-
I just have to wonder does Camp 7 have a secret magazine where they don’t have to make do with Benkert, they get Dick and Negroponte maybe, a problem page by Dr. Phil & a center spread of a hot chick force feeding turists the milk of human kindness at gunpoint? I think The Wire should investigate, I reckon those Camp 7 goons are getting all the sweet deals.
PS. The value of the week for this week on the website is:-
“Value of the Week”
Pride
“A high or inordinate opinion of one’s own dignity, importance, merit, or superiority, whether as cherished in the mind or as displayed in bearing, conduct, etc.”
dictionary.com
I kid you not.
PPS. The Dog Ate My Torture Homework-
The U.S. military has lost a year’s worth of records describing the Guantanamo interrogation and confinement of Osama bin Laden’s driver, a prosecutor said at the Yemeni captive’s war court hearing on Thursday. Lawyers for the driver, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, asked for the records to support their argument that prolonged isolation and harassment at the Guantanamo prison have mentally impaired him and compromised his ability to aid in his defense on war crimes charges.
Can’t wait for The Wire’s series of investigative reports on this.
Worth reading the whole piece, some excerpts-
Liberals may like to think that Thatcherite neo-liberalism (what I call Selfish Capitalism) has come and gone. But we may not grasp how far its ideas have become part of our intellectual furniture. Often unknowingly, we have been infected with the ethos of Gordon Gekko, venal anti-hero of the film Wall Street.
At the heart of its justification is social Darwinism, which first gained widespread acceptance in the late 19th century. The phrase “the survival of the fittest” was coined by Herbert Spencer, not by Charles Darwin. Spencer maintained that it would be disastrous for the state to do anything to protect the weakest. Nature should take its course, strengthening society.
Spencer was widely read and feted in the US. He was most in vogue when the gap between the richest and poorest was three times greater than today. Prominent US businessmen and politicians frequently used him to justify this.
We may like to think that was then, this is now. Think again. The wealth of the wealthy has massively increased since the introduction of Selfish Capitalism (Thatch/Blatcherism) in the late 1970s. There has been no increase since then in the average real wage for English-speaking people at all, no trickle-down effect whatsoever.
But Dawkins’ book, more than any other, supplied the “scientific” underpinning for Selfish Capitalism, along with the work of his friend, Matt Ridley. The writer-turned-businessman is both the principal British cheerleader of evolutionary ideology and a loud advocate of cutting back the state, explicitly linking the two. It’s a mind-boggling irony that Ridley was, until recently, also chairman of Northern Rock, which the taxpayer is to bail out following its disastrously ill-regulated dealings.
Those of us in the English-speaking world are twice as mentally ill today as in the 1970s. We are also twice as mentally ill (nearly one-quarter of us) as relatively Unselfish Capitalist mainland western Europeans. This is stuff we could do something about and Social Darwinism has been a giant distraction from doing so.
I don’t think he likes Dawkins…although who can blame him for Ridley, aristocrat slimeball.
Can our contemporary world be saved from the problems that ail us, from climate change and oil dependency, from AIDS and religious extremism, from poverty and inequality? Foreign Policy, the world’s most prestigious global affairs journal, is tackling this weighty question head on, in a new issue that asks 21 of our earth’s most thoughtful observers to suggest the “one solution that would make the world a better place.”That “one solution,” suggests Howard Gardner, the Harvard-based psychologist whose widely acclaimed books on human intelligence have been translated into 26 languages, ought to be a cap on the income and wealth that any one individual can accumulate.
The United States needs an income cap, Gardner posits in the new Foreign Policy, that limits the amount of money a single individual can annually take home to no more than “100 times as much money as the average worker in a society earns in a year.”
“If the average worker makes $40,000,” Gardner proposes, “the top compensated individual may keep $4 million a year.”
Gardner’s Foreign Policy contribution also advocates a cap on wealth, proposing that “no individual should be allowed to accumulate an estate more than 50 times the allowed annual income.”
If that allowed annual income were $4 million, then Gardner’s proposal would allow no one, at death, to bequest a fortune greater than $200 million. Any individual wealth above that would have to “be contributed to charity or donated to the government.”
What’s driving Gardner, a psychologist, to an economic prescription?
“Most people in the United States cannot even envision a society that doesn’t revolve around an untrammeled market,” Gardner writes, noting the “widespread assumption,” particularly among today’s young people, “that the most accurate measure of success is how much money you have accumulated, indeed that general merit can best be gauged by one’s net worth.” These assumptions, says the Harvard psychologist, have nurtured a society where accumulation “has gone way too far,” where a “hedge fund manager can take home a sum reminiscent of the gross national product of a small country.”
A cap on income and riches, Gardner adds, would raise billions, even trillions, “to begin to solve the problems about which others are writing in this collection of solutions to save the world.”
Attacks on Gardner’s proposal are already emerging. One nationally syndicated critique — from foundation president Clifford May — labeled Gardner’s antidote to inequality “preposterous.” Gardner’s Foreign Policy piece anticipates that sort of outraged reaction.
“To those who would scream ‘foul’ to such limits on personal wealth,” Gardner notes, “I would remind them that just 50 years ago, this proposal would have seemed reasonable, even generous.”
Sums up the Harvard scholar: “Our standards of ‘enough’ have become irrationally greedy. Were these proposals enacted, I predict that they would be accepted with amazing speed, and individuals would wonder why they had not always been in effect.”
Unrestrained capital will never even consider this, 100 to 1, hardly socialism. Even this week the super rich of the private equity mafia threatened the UK with not even paying the tiny amount of tax that they do if any moves are made to treat their income in the same way as everyone else’s. God forbid equality reared its ugly head, the global capitalist elite will not countenance anything getting in the way of their hoarding, such hoards also of course giving them great influence, fundamentally undemocratic. But then they never were, that was for saps to keep the cold war going. Their acquisitive fugue is now a threat to the very earth that supports us their greed is utterly irrational and everywhere culture shouts how great it is to celebrate such hoarding and opulence. Perhaps once the ecocide has become acute we can enjoy ‘Pimp My Biodome’ to keep our minds off our looming death in the wastelands. It’ll be on right before the new season of ‘Thunderdome Extreme Live- 2 Celebrities Enter, Only One Can Leave’ with your host Misterrrrrr Simon Cowell!
Thanks Emmanuel. Timing as impeccable as ever…because the effect is clinically proven to empower Bush.
And this-
Noam Chomsky used to be dubious about the likelihood of a U.S. attack and emailed him last week to ask if he is still of that opinion. Here’s his answer.
Yes, I was quite sceptical. Less so over the years. They’re desperate. Everything they touch is in ruins. They’re even in danger of losing control over Middle Eastern oil — to China, the topic that’s rarely discussed but is on every planner or corporation exec’s mind, if they’re sane. Iran already has observer status at the Shanghai Cooperation Organization — from which the US was pointedly excluded. Chinese trade with Saudi Arabia, even military sales, is growing fast. With the Bush administration in danger of losing Shiite Iraq, where most of the oil is (and most Saudi oil in regions with a harshly oppressed Shiite population), they may be in real trouble.
Under these circumstances, they’re unpredictable. They might go for broke, and hope they can salvage something from the wreckage. If they do bomb, I suspect it will be accompanied by a ground assault in Khuzestan, near the Gulf, where the oil is (and an Arab population — there already is an Ahwazi liberation front, probably organized by the CIA, which the US can “defend” from the evil Persians), and then they can bomb the rest of the country to rubble. And show who’s boss.
I suppose it is stupid to still be amazed by George Bush’s utter uselessness at -well anything- but such is life, two separate reports paint a stark picture of a man who is-
Though it was not the sort of thing one could say publicly anymore, the president still believed that Saddam had possessed weapons of mass destruction. He repeated this conviction to Andy Card all the way up until Card’s departure in April 2006…
Months before the Iraq invasion, President Bush apparently ignored a 2002 Oval Office briefing in which CIA director George Tenet provided the president with intelligence that Saddam Hussein did not possess weapons of mass destruction, according to former Clinton advisor and Salon columnist Sidney Blumenthal.
Reporting in Salon, Blumenthal writes that according to his sources, two former CIA officers,”Bush dismissed as worthless this information from the Iraqi foreign minister, a member of Saddam’s inner circle, although it turned out to be accurate in every detail. Tenet never brought it up again.”
Blumenthal also adds that the intelligence from that day was left out of the National Intelligence Estimate of October 2002, which definitively stated that had WMD.
“The president had no interest in the intelligence,” a CIA officer disclosed. “Bush didn’t give a fuck about the intelligence. He had his mind made up.”
He’s also a vicious and cruel man but I suppose what is remarkable is how so many other people cover up for this pathetic human being and how many who actually like and still support him. It’s a bit like a mass case of battered spouse syndrome- but I love ‘im, he didn’t mean to do it, you don’t understand him, he’s lovely really! Some insight is gained in this piece about the psychologists who did the research to prove what many know by instinct, make people scared and they become more pliable. Read the rest of this entry »
From Professor Stephen Soldz’s blog Psyche, Science, and Society
[Mark Benjamin] What worries psychologists like Reisner is that the potential loophole in the APA’s resolution echoes a similar one in the Military Commissions Act, which had a provision allegedly inserted into it at the behest of the Bush administration. President Bush signed that bill into law last October, setting new definitions in U.S. law for violations of the Geneva Conventions, which ban torture internationally. The potential loophole in the law comes with the criminalization of mental pain and suffering, but only damage that is “serious and non-transitory.” Bush said last fall the new law would allow the CIA to continue its interrogations at the black sites. Read the rest of this entry »
Years after Bill Hicks offered the sage advice to marketing professionals that they should kill themselves there is still no mass self-culling that would herald a new and better world, which is why this obscenity continues-
Fast food branding really does make food more appetising to children. A study has revealed that pre-school kids prefer foods wrapped in McDonalds packaging over the same snacks wrapped in unmarked packaging.
Dina Borzekowski at the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Health in Baltimore, Maryland, US, and her colleagues asked 63 preschoolers, aged three to five, to sample two meals, each consisting of a chicken nugget, a quarter of a hamburger, french fries, two baby carrots and a small cup of milk.
Although both meals came from a local McDonalds, only one of them appeared in its original packaging. Researchers presented items from the other meal in plain wrappers, which lacked the company’s distinctive logo. In most cases children said they tasted a difference between the two meals, and they overwhelmingly preferred the McDonalds-branded foods.
For example, 76 per cent favoured the fries presented in the branded packaging, compared with 13 per cent who liked the unbranded fries better. And while 60 per cent of the children preferred the McDonalds-branded chicken nuggets, only 10 per cent favoured the nuggets presented in plain wrapping. Read the rest of this entry »
Study: Iraq, Afghan Deployments Linked to Rising Child Abuse, Neglect. A new Army-backed study shows the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan are having an adverse effect on the wives and children of male servicemembers. Researchers at the Army’s Family Advocacy Program have found that army wives committed notably higher rates of child abuse and neglect while their husbands are deployed. Child neglect rose four-fold during periods military husbands were at war. Child abuse was nearly double. The study authors are calling for increased support services for military spouses left at home.
Overall, the rate of maltreatment — mild, moderate and severe — for males and females increased 40% when one spouse was deployed. The only areas that decreased were the rates for emotional and physical abuse. That decline was largely because of the deployment of male soldiers, who were responsible for most of the abuse when they were home.
During deployments, about 81 percent of the incidents analyzed were neglect, and about 10 percent were physical abuse. The rate of child abuse during deployment was greater for offenders who were white than for those who were black or Hispanic.
The civilian mother committed child abuse during the time the soldier-husband was deployed at a rate three times greater than when he was not deployed. The rate of child neglect was four times greater. Rates of child abuse for male civilian parents were not greater, researchers noted, suggesting that the two groups may be different in terms of the stress they experience, or how they mobilize resources to help them during deployments.
When the soldier was home, about 19 percent of incidents were physical abuse, and 59 percent were neglect. The soldier committed about 59 percent of the incidents during periods of time at home. About 11 percent of the incidents during deployment were committed by soldiers who were home on leave. Researchers did not analyze the types of abuse committed by soldiers when they were home.
High-stress jobs make young workers twice as likely to suffer from major depression and anxiety disorders, according to a British study of mental health in the workplace.
Psychiatric assessments of nearly 1,000 people in the early stages of their careers revealed that one in 20 can expect to experience serious depression or anxiety every year as a direct result of work.
The study is the first of its kind to establish a firm link between stressful working conditions and poor mental health among people who had no previous history of the disorders before their career began.
Previous studies across Europe and the US have found that cases of depression have risen in the past two decades, mirroring increases in reported work stress.
But do not fear the Church of the Free Market devotees, including Gulf War Syndrome denier Prof. Simon Wessely is working to redefine illness.
Ten Percent 