The Gap Between Trans-Atlantic Thinking

An excellent piece on the emotional gulf that divides Americans and Europeans. What does that portend for those of us who were raised with both American and European values homogenized in one body and brain - a constant internal conflict between the two perspectives and cultures ending up in a confusion of bipolar thought pulling the sufferer constantly back and forth between the two cultures and thought processes. Fred

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The Gap in Transatlantic Emotions

Monday 11 May 2009

by: Dominique Moïsi | Visit article original @ Les Echos

Dominique Moïsi reflects, "Of course, it's neither possible, nor, undoubtedly, desirable, to 'clone' 27 copies of Barack Obama. But how is it possible to reduce the 'hope deficit' that exists in Europe today?" (Photo: Radio Free Europe)

In spite of persistent misunderstandings, an incontestable rapprochement between Europe and the United States on the diplomatic and social fronts has occurred since Barack Obama's arrival in office. However, with respect to emotions and values, the gap remains as wide as it used to be between the two sides of the Atlantic. One may even wonder whether it hasn't deepened. So today, there's much more collective hope and individual fear in America. The opposite is true in Europe: there's less collective hope and less individual fear. It would be easy and not necessarily incorrect, to explain this difference in two words: Obama in the United States and the welfare state - that is, social protection - in Europe. In the United States, strengthened by a president who incarnates the return of hope and who simultaneously inspires and reassures, Americans are beginning to believe that the bottom of the crisis has been reached and that the worst is behind them. What was a shiver of hope only at the beginning of the spring has solidified as the days and weeks have gone by. Collectively animated by a mixture of optimism natural to American culture and profound nationalism, Americans have made their president's campaign slogan their own: "Yes, we can." Conversely, the extreme individualism that is one of the keys to American optimism translates on an individual level to situations that we in Europe would rightly deem perfectly unacceptable. "Tent cities fill up with victims of the economic crisis," headlined the popular US daily "USA Today," a few days ago. The media unceasingly report the tragic cases of middle-class Americans, for whom the loss of a job and health insurance coverage may literally lead to death when they are unable to assume the care of a serious illness such as cancer. It is not correct, as certain uber-capitalists sometimes maintain, that the absence of a social safety net makes people or society stronger. The goal of a society born of the Enlightenment cannot be to create a people "armed" with guns on the one hand and "disarmed" in the face of an illness on the other. Moreover, in a society in which people "live to work," the loss of a job is perhaps even more destabilizing than it may be in a continent like Europe, where people tend to "work to live." On this front, the behavior of a majority of Americans faced with the prospect of retirement is very revealing of a country where identity derives from work. Family breakup, very often a product of geographic distances, also makes retirement much less often associated, as is the case in Europe, with the joy of taking care of one's grandchildren.

Also see below:
The Economist: France Is Doing Better Than the Anglo-Saxons •

In Europe, the situation is exactly the opposite of that in the United States: Our societies, perhaps because they are older and more cynical, bask in a collective gloom that they have trouble emerging from. Of course, it's neither possible, nor, undoubtedly, desirable, to "clone" 27 copies of Barack Obama. But how is it possible to reduce the "hope deficit" that exists in Europe today? On the eve of elections for the European Parliament that will undoubtedly see gloom triumph through record abstention levels, the answer is far from obvious. Europe suffers from a deficit of incarnation, a deficit of plan, a deficit of identity. In contrast, America today has all that in abundance. However, it's not at all certain that it will be easier for the United States to respond to its citizens' individual fears through a reform of its health care and social protections systems than it will be possible for Europe to produce a renaissance of collective hope. The two sides of the Atlantic should, in fact, provide each other with a source of inspiration, to soften the consequences of inequalities in America and to rediscover the meaning of collective hope in Europe. Formulated in these terms, the European challenge certainly appears even more formidable than the American one.

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Dominique Moïsi, a special adviser at Ifri, is a guest professor at Harvard University.

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Translation: Truthout French language editor Leslie Thatcher.

A Rose By Any Other Name is a ROSE!

SECRECY

Bush Memos Suggest Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There

by Sheri Fink, ProPublica - April 17, 2009 4:38 pm EDT




Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden was fond of saying that when it came to handling high-value terror suspects, he would play in fair territory, but with “chalk dust on my cleats.” Four legal memos released yesterday by the Obama administration make it clear that the referee role in CIA interrogations was played by its medical and psychological personnel.

According to the U.S. Department of Justice’s Office of Legal Counsel, which authored the memos, legal approval to use waterboarding, sleep deprivation and other abusive techniques pivoted on the existence of a “system of medical and psychological monitoring” of interrogations. Medical and psychological personnel were assigned to monitor interrogations and intervene to ensure that interrogators didn’t cause “serious or permanent harm” and thus violate the U.S. federal statute against torture.

The reasoning sounds almost circular. As one memo, from May 2005, put it: “The close monitoring of each detainee for any signs that he is at risk of experiencing severe physical pain reinforces the conclusion that the combined use of interrogation techniques is not intended to inflict such pain.”

In other words, as long as medically trained personnel were present and approved of the techniques being used, it was not torture.

The memos provide official confirmation of both much-reported and previously unknown roles of doctors, psychologists, physician assistants and other medical personnel with the CIA’s Office of Medical Services (OMS). The government’s lawyers characterized these medical roles as “safeguards” for detainees.

Medical oversight was present from the beginning of the special interrogation program following the 9/11 attacks and appears to have grown more formalized over the program’s existence. The earliest of the four memos, from August 2002, states that a medical expert with experience in the military’s Survival Evasion Resistance, Escape (SERE) training would be present during waterboarding of detainee Abu Zubaydah and would put a stop to procedures “if deemed medically necessary to prevent severe medical or physical harm to Zubaydah.” (All interrogation techniques, the memos said, were “imported” from SERE.)

Later, OMS personnel were involved in “designing safeguards for, and in monitoring implementation of, the procedures” used on other high-value detainees. In December 2004, the OMS produced a set of “Guidelines on Medical and Psychological Support to Detainee Rendition, Interrogation and Detention,” a still-secret document that is heavily quoted from in three legal memos that were written the following year.

The CIA declined our request to comment further on the OMS’ role in detainee treatment. The OMS employs physicians, psychologists and other medical professionals to care for CIA employees and their families.

Perhaps the most chilling aspect of the memos is their intimation that medical professionals conducted a form of research on the detainees, clearly without their consent. “In order to best inform future medical judgments and recommendations, it is important that every application of the waterboard be thoroughly documented,” one memo reads. The documentation included not only how long the procedure lasted, how much water was used and how it was poured, but also “if the naso- or oropharynx was filled, what sort of volume was expelled… and how the subject looked between each treatment.” Special instructions were also issued with regard to documenting experience with sleep deprivation, and “regular reporting on medical and psychological experiences with the use of these techniques on detainees” was required.

The Nuremberg Code, adopted after the horrors of “medical research” during the Nazi Holocaust, requires, among other things, the consent of subjects and their ability to call a halt to their participation.


Former CIA Director Michael V. Hayden (Getty Images)
The memos also draw heavily on the advice of psychologists that interrogation techniques would not be expected to cause lasting harm. At times this advice sounds contradictory. While calling waterboarding “medically acceptable,” the OMS also deemed it “the most traumatic of the enhanced interrogation techniques.”

The fact that traumatic events have the potential to cause long-lasting post-traumatic stress syndrome has been well documented. Physicians for Human Rights, in interviews with eleven former detainees held in Iraq and Afghanistan, found “severe, long-term physical and psychological consequences.” “All the individuals we evaluated were ultimately released without ever being charged,” said Dr. Allen Keller, medical director of the Bellevue/New York University School of Medicine Program for Survivors of Torture.

The memos describe the techniques in highly precise and clinical detail, befitting a medical textbook. During waterboarding, in which a physician and psychologist were to be present at all times, “the detainee is monitored to ensure that he does not develop respiratory distress. If the detainee is not breathing freely after the cloth is removed from his face, he is immediately moved to a vertical position in order to clear the water from his mouth, nose and nasopharynx.” Side effects including vomiting, aspiration and throat spasm that could cut off breathing were each addressed: “In the event of such spasms…if necessary, the intervening physician would perform a tracheotomy.”

While physician assistants could be present when most “enhanced” techniques were applied, “use of the waterboard requires the presence of a physician,” one memo said, quoting the OMS guidelines.

Doctors were also described as having vetted the practices for safety. Certain limits on waterboarding were created “with extensive input from OMS.” One memo states that OMS “doctors and psychologists” confirmed that combining the various techniques “would not operate in a different manner from the way they do individually, so as to cause severe pain.”

Medical and psychological personnel were required to observe whenever interrogators came into physical contact with detainees, including slapping them and pushing them into flexible walls (“walling”). Whenever a detainee was doused with cold water, a medical officer had to be on hand to monitor for signs of hypothermia. Confining prisoners to cramped boxes required “continuing consultation between the interrogators and OMS officers.” Prisoners made to stand for long periods to prevent sleep were to be carefully monitored for swelling of their legs and other dangerous conditions, and at least three times early in the program were switched, on medical advice, to “horizontal sleep deprivation.”

This was one example of how medical personnel could, according to the CIA, help prevent “severe physical or mental pain or suffering” on the part of the detainees. However the memos show that the OMS’s role was not merely to limit the medical impact of interrogations, but also to consult on the effectiveness of interrogations. A May 30, 2005 memo quotes the OMS suggesting that cramped confinement was “not…particularly effective” because it provides “a safe haven offering respite from interrogation.”

Monitoring interrogations is a role that the American Medical Association, among others, has rejected, pointing out that the presence of physicians or other medical personnel could paradoxically make interrogations more dangerous. As Keller explains it: “The interrogator may think well, the health professional will stop me if I go too far. The health professional is thinking I’m really here at the behest of the CIA. There’s a tension of dual loyalty.”

Just as officials in the Justice Dept. now condemn waterboarding as torture, so, too, did opinion change at another organization, the American Psychological Association. In the frightening days following the 9/11 attacks, “there were two schools of thoughts in the psychological community. One was if you were there on the ground you could do some good," said APA spokesperson Rhea Farberman, whose organization was criticized for originally taking that position. The group's current stance is to forbid psychologists from participating, she said. "If you are there on the ground, you may be seen as condoning the behavior.”

Some medical professionals are calling for colleagues to be investigated and sanctioned. But finding out which professionals were involved in designing, monitoring and implementing the interrogation techniques may be difficult. The four memos were released almost in their entirety. The few redactions concerned mainly the names of the personnel involved.

Sheri Fink is both ProPublica reporter and a medical doctor.

Update 4/18: We added some detail about American Psychological Association's stance on interrogations.

Tags: CIA, Detainee Treatment Scandal, Memos, Missing Memos, Torture