There seems to be a slowly growing clamor about whether Obama is going to order some sort of independent commission to determine whether to bring charges against administration officials for their role in torture of “detainees” (a combination of battlefield combatants, common criminals, globally renowned terrorists and random people handed over to us, often for large sums) and I’m sure it will come to a climax within the first couple months of his presidency. My two cents are documented here, and if you haven’t seen that documentary I strongly encourage you to. It definitely helps frame the actual discussion as opposed to the “ticking time bomb” fantasy or “fanatics won’t voluntarily give information but will under duress” that is so often mentioned. I strongly oppose torture on both a moral and pragmatic basis, and we’ve seen similar debate for centuries and it’s always eventually settled the same way, so it’s kind of ridiculous that this is even under discussion.
But I am less concerned about the “enhanced interrogation” policy, which should definitely not be much of a factor in the near term — especially since Army and CIA intelligence was against it from the start — and more about Justice. To me it seems that no concept is more universally agreed upon and no concept is less agreed about, especially when it comes to justice for awful crimes. For many justice is primarily a tool for the aggrieved, a process that promises catharsis through punishment. For others it is about healing and moving forward, a facilitator for the stages of grief. And of course there are deeper themes: whether it’s keeping in check the innate sinfulness of man, or finding redemption and realizing the holiness of life.
And of course, there are crimes that are so disgusting that justice is impossible; crimes that tap into our most primal fears and seduce our inner “savage” that values survival above all.
According to police sources, Deccan Mujahideen has warned of a repeat of Mumbai terror attack at Indira Gandhi International Airport and three railway stations.
The scope of the terror attack on Mumbai was much wider, The Times of India has reliably learnt. The neighbourhood around the Taj would have been blown to smithereens if two RDX bombs fitted with timers had gone off. A third bomb placed near the entrance of the Oberoi Trident exploded, but the bomb disposal squad put a cover on it, substantially reducing the impact. According to highly-placed sources, the bomb disposal squad found the two bombs and defused them in time, hours after the terrorists took over the Taj on Wednesday night.
They said that just one look at the bodies of the dead hostages as well as terrorists showed it was a battle of attrition that was fought over three days at the Oberoi and the Taj hotels in Mumbai.
Doctors working in a hospital where all the bodies, including that of the terrorists, were taken said they had not seen anything like this in their lives.
“Bombay has a long history of terror. I have seen bodies of riot victims, gang war and previous terror attacks like bomb blasts. But this was entirely different. It was shocking and disturbing,” a doctor said.
Asked what was different about the victims of the incident, another doctor said: “It was very strange. I have seen so many dead bodies in my life, and was yet traumatised. A bomb blast victim’s body might have been torn apart and could be a very disturbing sight. But the bodies of the victims in this attack bore such signs about the kind of violence of urban warfare that I am still unable to put my thoughts to words,” he said.
Asked specifically if he was talking of torture marks, he said: “It was apparent that most of the dead were tortured. What shocked me were the telltale signs showing clearly how the hostages were executed in cold blood,” one doctor said.
The other doctor, who had also conducted the post-mortem of the victims, said: “Of all the bodies, the Israeli victims bore the maximum torture marks. It was clear that they were killed on the 26th itself. It was obvious that they were tied up and tortured before they were killed. It was so bad that I do not want to go over the details even in my head again,” he said.
Corroborating the doctors’ claims about torture was the information that the Intelligence Bureau had about the terror plan. “During his interrogation, Ajmal Kamal said they were specifically asked to target the foreigners, especially the Israelis,” an IB source said.
It is also said that the Israeli hostages were killed on the first day as keeping them hostage for too long would have focused too much international attention. “They also might have feared the chances of Israeli security agencies taking over the operations at the Nariman House,” he reasoned.
After discussing the above article along with another, Israel Matzav concludes:
With over a billion people living in India, the terrorists sought out the most visible of its 5,000 Jews. That’s because there is no hatred in the world like Jew-hatred, and today’s Islamists are as expert practitioners as their European forebears. Jew-hatred has nothing to do with the State of Israel or any rational grievance against the Jewish people. It is the oldest hatred in the books. And it’s not going to go away even if the Jews were to leave Israel for other parts of the world.
The Indian commando raid launched to save the lives of Jewish and Israeli hostages at Mumbai’s Chabad House may have inadvertently ended the lives of one or more of the hostages, the head of a six-man ZAKA team in the terror-stricken Indian city told The Jerusalem Post on Sunday.
Speaking by phone from Mumbai, Haim Weingarten, the head of the Mumbai ZAKA team, said, “Based on what I saw, [although] I can’t identify the type of bullets in the bodies [of the victims], I don’t think the terrorists killed all the hostages, to put it gently.”
[snip]
ZAKA officials believe that in a final act of love, the director of the Chabad House, Rabbi Gavriel Holtzberg, wrapped the body of his wife Rivka in a tallit before succumbing to his own wounds during the final hours of the siege.
ZAKA volunteers on the scene found the bodies of Israeli grandmother Yocheved Orpaz, 62, and Jewish Mexican national Norma Shvarzblat Rabinovich, 50, bound to one another with a phone cord.
Members of the ZAKA team found the bodies of six Jewish hostages at the Chabad House minutes after a two-day raid by Indian commandos ended on Saturday. However, Indian security forces ordered them out of the building before they could remove the bodies, fearing they would step on grenades scattered throughout the facility. The security forces allowed them to return only hours later.
Based on observations of the bodies, ZAKA officials estimate that Rabbi Holtzberg was the last to die. They placed his death close to the time that Indian commandos, who were dropped onto the roof on Friday morning, fought their way down the multi-floor building.
Holtzberg’s body was found close to the tallit-wrapped body of his wife, Rivka, ZAKA officials said, adding that he may have managed to hide and survive long enough to wrap his wife. They did not know whether Holtzberg had succumbed to wounds sustained earlier or whether he was killed on Friday. The remaining hostages were killed by the terrorists during the previous two days, according to their estimates.
November 16th, 2008 By DR. CLARISSA PINKOLA ESTES and SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnists
In September of this year, the American Psychological Association reversed a longstanding policy by voting to prohibit its members from participating in interrogations or acting in an advisory capacity at Guantánamo Bay and elsewhere after revelations that some psychologists have been involved in so-called intensive interrogation sessions. The ban belatedly brings the APA into line with the American Medical Association and American Psychiatric Association.
In a recent New York Timesop-ed piece, Stanley Fish asks a provocative question: Why did psychology, generally considered to be one of the most liberal of disciplines, lag behind its sister professions regarding one of the most troubling consequences of the so-called War on Terror — the Bush administration’s approval of the use of torture and enlisting health-care professionals in and out of uniform into helping extract information from terrorists and other so-called enemy combatants?
Joining Shaun Mullen in discussing this issue is Dr. Clarissa Pinkola Estés, a The Moderate Voice associate editor, fellow columnist and friend. Dr. E is a psychoanalyst who has been in clinical practice for 38 years and specializes in post-trauma recovery, often including veterans, as well as being a poet and author whose books have been published in 32 languages. Mullen is a veteran and career journalist who has covered Vietnam and other wars, and has written extensively on what he calls the Bush Torture Regime.
* * * * *
SM: Is Fish onto something in saying that your fellow psychologists have lagged behind doctors of medicine and psychiatry in addressing torture? And that by implication those are exclusively healing professions but yours is not?
Dr. E: The charge is an important one. Why did it take so long — well over a year after the issue was brought before its national convention — before the APA finally banned members from participating in not only interrogations, but advising the CIA and military on the effects of torture, including literally advising how much assault a person’s body, mind and spirit might be able to sustain before they became entirely undone.
For myself, coming from a refugee and deportee immigrant family, all of this stank of another time and place – Adolph Hitler, who long before the death and torture camps for murdering Jews ordered the extermination of German children if they were lame, developmentally retarded or had other disabilities. He tried to enlist German physicians and pediatricians to write the orders for the death or use in experiments of children confined to institutions.
Even though a majority of German doctors — and the clergy – loudly refused to participate in so-called “mercy killing” programs led by Philipp Bouhler (photo, left), some doctors complied and well over 40,000 young innocents were sent to their deaths at Brandenburg, Hadamar Institute, Grafeneck and elsewhere. Thousands were kept alive for experimentation who had Down Syndrome, what we would now recognize as autism, lead poisoning, and brain damage from accidents and beatings.
I am not one to use the Hitlerian trope to condemn people. But at Guantánamo and elsewhere, psychologists were enlisted to participate in torture and the slowness of the APA to ban such activities is stunning to people of conscience.
I wrote about how the APA was lagging in a December 2007 The Moderate Voicepost. At that time and long before, the voices of many others in my profession were being raised vociferously, yet the APA did not insist on an end to these practices that are so egregiously antithetical to the principles of protecting, helping and healing human life. Ours is supposed to be a healing profession — psychologists, psychoanalysts, psychiatrists, all. We are not separated by institutional memberships, but rather held together as brothers and sisters who are called upon to mediate and help the suffering of this world.
November 14th, 2008 By SHAUN MULLEN, TMV Columnist
GEORGE WALKER BUSH: THEN AND NOW
I had long planned to post an abridged text of George Bush’s 2000 Republican National Convention acceptance speech closer to Inauguration Day and compare his words with his deeds, but the post-mortems already are flying fast and furious. This includes a lot of revisionist clap-trap from conservative bloggers whose heads remain firmly up their backsides, including drivel to the effect that because Bush “is a kind and decent man” the excesses and failures of the last eight years should be overlooked if not excused.
I happened to be in the hall when Bush accepted the nomination that steamy August night in Philadelphia and was horrified not just by the vacuity of his words but the knowledge that up on the podium was a resume without a man into which every neoconservative and other Republican with a burr in their saddle would pour their pet animosities, causes and policies.
It was going to be rocky four or eight years, but no one could have foreseen the scope and magnitude of the Bush administration’s epic failures, including its inability to confront every major crisis on its watch.
Following are excerpts from the speech in italics and what has transpired:
November 11th, 2008 By JOE GANDELMAN, Editor-In-Chief
President Elect Barack Obama wants to close the U.S. detention camp at Guantanamo Bay, but it’s proving to have some side issues that are making any decision…torturous. Reuters reports:
U.S. President-elect Barack Obama has made no decision on how try detainees at Guantanamo Bay but remains committed to closing the prison, a senior foreign policy adviser said on Monday as human rights groups urged swift action.
Five human rights groups urged European governments to accept Guantanamo prisoners who cannot be sent home for fear of persecution, while a sixth group called on Obama to sign an order shutting the prison camp on the day he takes office.
The global efforts are aimed at pressuring Obama to make good on his campaign pledge to close the widely reviled detention camp at the U.S. naval base in Cuba and halt the special tribunals that try foreign terrorism suspects outside the regular courts.
“President-elect Obama, with a stroke of your presidential pen, on Day One of your administration, you can ensure that our government will be faithful to the Constitution and to the principles upon which America was founded,” the American Civil Liberties Union said in a full-page ad in The New York Times.
The White House has virtually challenged Obama to make good on his promise to shut down the facility, saying “it’s not so easy” – and, indeed, the issue is proving to be a legal minefield, TIME notes:
Obama has vowed to close Guantánamo and reject the Military Commissions Act, the 2006 law underpinning the ongoing Guantánamo tribunals. But major hurdles stand in the way of doing so, even for a new President with a clear mandate.
First, what do you do with the roughly 255 people currently imprisoned at Guantánamo — a group of whom only 23 have been charged? If Obama wanted to move as swiftly as possible to close Guantánamo, the strongest step he could take as President would be to simply shutter the camp by Executive Order and transfer all of the detainees to prison sites inside the U.S. At that point, in theory, the detainees would face four possible fates: being charged with offenses that could be tried in federal courts; court-marshaled according to the Uniform Code of Military Justice; turned over to the governments of their native countries; or simply released. (See pictures from inside Camp X-Ray at Guantánamo here.)
Many civil rights activists say existing military and civilian criminal courts can handle the Guantánamo cases and decide on the disposition of each of those 255 individuals, despite the Bush Administration’s arguments otherwise. But the legal limbo many Guantánamo detainees have endured for years still poses significant problems. That is because the primary purpose of detaining these people was not to stage trials but rather to gain usable intelligence through interrogation. Forming proper criminal cases at this point would be difficult.
It was just fine with Barack Obama and John McCain that they could pretty much avoid talking about the Bush administration’s kangaroo court military tribunals and its embrace of torture during the presidential campaign.
While these aspects of the U.S.’s so-called War on Terror were not a priority for voters who are beleaguered by a collapsed economy and wondering how to pay for their Uncle Leo’s thousand-dollar medications, the candidates also knew that there are no easy answers about how to deal with Guantánamo Bay, but one tentacle of the legacy of a cowardly president who is dumping an extraordinary amount of self-created effluvia in his successor’s lap before he tucks his tail between his legs and scurries back to Texas.
George Bush said he would shutter Guantánamo after a third Supreme Court ruling that the tribunals made a mockery of the Constitution. Obama and McCain also said they would close the detention camp, and Obama will now have to make good on that pledge because Bush, of course, has reneged while pretty much thumbing his nose at the ruling as he did the first two.
Compounding the problem is that while a majority of the so-called enemy combatants were never threats, some of them were and remain so. These include dozens of the 255 prisoners remaining at Guantánamo, including some with connections to Osama bin Laden and other top Al Qaeda leaders, who have moldered at the Navy base in Cuba without being brought to trial as the tribunal system continues to unravel.
The tidal wave of global reaction to the election of President-elect Barack Obama is enough to make a foreign desk editor cry over what to do next. Coming later today will be articles from Russia and Iraq. Here are just a few of the many stories posted on WORLDMEETS.US in the past 24 hours:
“The arrival today of the first man of color to the apex of power in the only global superpower testifies to the logic of this country and its evolution. Once again, America was ready. … Freedom is that which has allowed both slavery and its eradication; the assertion of civil rights and the existence of the Ku Klux Klan; the many ’success stories’ of ’self-made men,’ and the absence of the social state. Whoever is in power in America, this will remain at the heart of the country’s psyche.”
“Economically, culturally and militarily, the notion that the strongest must stand alone has been shown to be absurd. Cooperation rather than confrontation and negotiation rather than dictation are the new and astounding ideas embodied by Obama. … Obama in no magician - and McCain would have been less so - but he has one great advantage: He can, since he isn’t committed to a rigid doctrine and doesn’t believe himself to be on a divine mission (like Bush has), act according to rational and pragmatic reasoning. He can finally reestablish a government based on reality - no matter how bleak that may be once initiated.”
“”Let us not be stingy with our pleasure; good news is pretty rare these days. And when we use the word “us,” we mean the near-totality of the rest of the world, who were worried that we would not be seconded in our passion for Barack Obama by the American voters on Election Day.”
“Obama is the President of the United States that the planet requires. Yet paradoxically, this doesn’t necessarily imply that an Obama presidency is the best thing for United States society. … one must wonder whether the society of that country, and above all, the United States Congress, will agree. Why? Because what Obama wants to do is make the United States somewhat similar to a European welfare state, and it’s likely, sooner or later, that United Statesiens [people of the United States] will turn their back on such a project. In fact, even though the country is one of the most advanced, it has the greatest inequality in terms of wealth distribution and has never had a viable and durable social-democratic party.”
Is Barack Obama the antidote to eight years of George W. Bush? Anyone reading this editorial from Iran’s state-controlled Tehran Times would certainly get that impression. Unquestionably, Tehran is even more pleased than most Obama fans about the President-elect’s success. The editorial asks and answers: ‘And why was Obama the world’s candidate? Quite simply, because they feel they can talk to him.’ The winds of dialogue are surely blowing. Now to see what comes of it …
Even though a majority of German doctors — and the clergy – loudly refused to participate in so-called “mercy killing” programs led by 
