source: Raw Story

by Daniel Tencer

Last spring, the news media trumpeted Vice President Dick Cheney’s challenge to release the CIA’s torture memos.

It was a move Cheney supported because, he said, the documents would vindicate his claims that the Bush administration’s torture program operated within the law, and provided indispensable information in protecting the US from further terrorist attacks.

Since Monday, when the CIA released a significant part of those documents — a 2004 CIA inspector general’s report on torture practices — there has been hardly a mention in the mainstream press about the fact that the report largely contradicted what the former vice president has been saying in public.

“The professionals involved in that program were very, very cautious, very careful — wouldn’t do anything without making certain it was authorized and that it was legal,” Cheney told ABC News last December. “And any suggestion to the contrary is just wrong. Did it produce the desired results? I think it did.”

Yet, this week, as the report was slowly processed by reporters and analysts, it became increasingly clear that the program did not produce “the desired results.”

As Greg Sargent points out at WhoRunsGov, a senior homeland security adviser to President George W. Bush now admits the report’s conclusions do not make it possible to give credit to the torture program for the fact the US has not suffered a major terrorist attack since 9/11.

“It’s very difficult to draw a cause and effect, because it’s not clear when techniques were applied versus when that information was received,” Frances Townsend reportedly told CNN. “It’s implicit. It seems, when you read the report, that we got … the most critical information after techniques had been applied. But the report doesn’t say that.”

Cheney’s efforts to paint the torture program as being professionally run and closely supervised run into problems in light of the report.

In February of 2008, Cheney told a meeting of the Conservative Political Action Committee: “The procedures of the CIA program are designed to be safe, and they are in full compliance with the nation’s laws and treaty obligations. They’ve been carefully reviewed by the Department of Justice, and very carefully monitored. The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law.”

He had used almost the exact same words in a speech at the Heritage Foundation a month earlier.

“The procedures of the CIA program are designed to be safe,” Cheney told the conservative group. “They are in full compliance with the nation’s laws and treaty obligations. They’ve been carefully reviewed by the Department of Justice, and they are very carefully monitored. The program is run by highly trained professionals who understand their obligations under the law. And the program has uncovered a wealth of information that has foiled attacks against the United States; information that has saved countless, innocent lives.”

Yet some of those “highly trained professionals” had little more than two weeks of training on the job.

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source: Science Daily

In a study published in the most recent issue of the journal Sociological Inquiry, sociologists from four major research institutions focus on one of the most curious aspects of the 2004 presidential election: the strength and resilience of the belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of 9/11.

Although this belief influenced the 2004 election, they claim it did not result from pro-Bush propaganda, but from an urgent need by many Americans to seek justification for a war already in progress.

The findings may illuminate reasons why some people form false beliefs about the pros and cons of health-care reform or regarding President Obama’s citizenship, for example.

The study, “There Must Be a Reason: Osama, Saddam and Inferred Justification” calls such unsubstantiated beliefs “a serious challenge to democratic theory and practice” and considers how and why it was maintained by so many voters for so long in the absence of supporting evidence.

Co-author Steven Hoffman, Ph.D., visiting assistant professor of sociology at the University at Buffalo, says, “Our data shows substantial support for a cognitive theory known as ‘motivated reasoning,’ which suggests that rather than search rationally for information that either confirms or disconfirms a particular belief, people actually seek out information that confirms what they already believe.

“In fact,” he says, “for the most part people completely ignore contrary information.

“The study demonstrates voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information,” he explains.

While numerous scholars have blamed a campaign of false information and innuendo from the Bush administration, this study argues that the primary cause of misperception in the 9/11-Saddam Hussein case was not the presence or absence of accurate data but a respondent’s desire to believe in particular kinds of information.

“The argument here is that people get deeply attached to their beliefs,” Hoffman says.

“We form emotional attachments that get wrapped up in our personal identity and sense of morality, irrespective of the facts of the matter. The problem is that this notion of ‘motivated reasoning’ has only been supported with experimental results in artificial settings. We decided it was time to see if it held up when you talk to actual voters in their homes, workplaces, restaurants, offices and other deliberative settings.”

The survey and interview-based study was conducted by Hoffman, Monica Prasad, Ph.D., assistant professor of sociology at Northwestern University; Northwestern graduate students Kieren Bezila and Kate Kindleberger; Andrew Perrin, Ph.D., associate professor of sociology, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill; and UNC graduate students Kim Manturuk, Andrew R. Payton and Ashleigh Smith Powers (now an assistant professor of political science and psychology at Millsaps College).

The study addresses what it refers to as a “serious challenge to democratic theory and practice that results when citizens with incorrect information cannot form appropriate preferences or evaluate the preferences of others.”

One of the most curious “false beliefs” of the 2004 presidential election, they say, was a strong and resilient belief among many Americans that Saddam Hussein was linked to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001.

Hoffman says that over the course of the 2004 presidential campaign, several polls showed that majorities of respondents believed that Saddam Hussein was either partly or largely responsible for the 9/11 attacks, a percentage that declined very slowly, dipping below 50 percent only in late 2003.

“This misperception that Hussein was responsible for the Twin Tower terrorist attacks was very persistent, despite all the evidence suggesting that no link existed,” Hoffman says.

The study team employed a technique called “challenge interviews” on a sample of voters who reported believing in a link between Saddam and 9/11. The researchers presented the available evidence of the link, along with the evidence that there was no link, and then pushed respondents to justify their opinion on the matter. For all but one respondent, the overwhelming evidence that there was no link left no impact on their arguments in support of the link.

One unexpected pattern that emerged from the different justifications that subjects offered for continuing to believe in the validity of the link was that it helped citizens make sense of the Bush Administration’s decision to go to war against Iraq.

“We refer to this as ‘inferred justification,’” says Hoffman “because for these voters, the sheer fact that we were engaged in war led to a post-hoc search for a justification for that war.

“People were basically making up justifications for the fact that we were at war,” he says.

“One of the things that is really interesting about this, from both the perspective of voting patterns but also for democratic theory more generally, Hoffman says, “is that we did not find that people were being duped by a campaign of innuendo so much as they were actively constructing links and justifications that did not exist.

“They wanted to believe in the link,” he says, “because it helped them make sense of a current reality. So voters’ ability to develop elaborate rationalizations based on faulty information, whether we think that is good or bad for democratic practice, does at least demonstrate an impressive form of creativity.”

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source: Newsweek

A long-awaited report on post-9/11 interrogation tactics will reveal harrowing new details about treatment of suspected terrorists.

by Mark Hosenball and Michael Isikoff

A long-suppressed report by the Central Intelligence Agency’s inspector general to be released next week reveals that CIA interrogators staged mock executions as part of the agency’s post-9/11 program to detain and question terror suspects, NEWSWEEK has learned.

According to two sources—one who has read a draft of the paper and one who was briefed on it—the report describes how one detainee, suspected USS Cole bomber Abd al-Rahim al-Nashiri, was threatened with a gun and a power drill during the course of CIA interrogation. According to the sources, who like others quoted in this article asked not to be named while discussing sensitive information, Nashiri’s interrogators brandished the gun in an effort to convince him that he was going to be shot. Interrogators also turned on a power drill and held it near him. “The purpose was to scare him into giving [information] up,” said one of the sources. A federal law banning the use of torture expressly forbids threatening a detainee with “imminent death.”

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source: Raw Story

by Diane Sweet

DR. BRUCE JESSEN

There’s an article in today’s New York Times about Bruce Jessen and Jim Mitchell, two military retirees and psychologists with no expertise on al-Qaeda, no foreign language skills, no experience in real interrogations, and with no relevant degrees (“…their Ph.D. dissertations were on high blood pressure and family therapy”).

Nevertheless, these two seemingly managed to cash in on America’s “global war on terror.”

With little more than their psychology credentials and “an intimate knowledge of a brutal treatment regimen used decades ago by Chinese Communists,” the pair, known as “Doc Mitchell” and “Doc Jessen” built “a thriving business that made millions of dollars selling interrogation and training services to the CIA,” per the Times piece.

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source: Huffington Post

In sharp contrast to Obama’s pre-election rhetoric, new rendition target alleges torture

by Scott Horton

During the 2008 presidential campaign, Barack Obama sharply criticized the Bush Administration’s extraordinary renditions program. “To build a better, freer world, we must first behave in ways that reflect the decency and aspirations of the American people,” he wrote in Foreign Affairs. “This means ending the practice of shipping away prisoners in the dead of night to be tortured in far-off countries, of detaining thousands without charge or trial, of maintaining a network of secret prisons to jail people beyond the reach of law.” But Obama was consistently careful never to commit to ending the practice of rendition entirely. When the issue flared shortly after his inauguration, senior administration officials were quick to say that abuses including torture would end, but that “ordinary” renditions – the spiriting away of suspects from other countries without going through the formal process of extradition — would be continued in a cleaned-up form. Now in a federal court in suburban Washington, a case is unfolding that gives us a practical sense of what an Obama-era rendition looks like.

Raymond Azar, a 45-year-old Lebanese construction manager with a grade school education, is employed by Sima International, a Lebanon-based contractor that does work for the U.S. military in Iraq and Afghanistan. He also has the unlikely distinction of being the first target of a rendition carried out on the Obama watch.

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source: Raw Story
by Stephen C. Webster

Lawyers for President Barack Obama’s administration have asked the U.S. Supreme Court to block the release of photos showing prisoner abuse by US soldiers in Iraq.

In the petition, President Obama writes, “there are nearly 200,000 Americans who are serving in harm’s way, and I have a solemn responsibility for their safety as Commander-in-Chief. It is my judgment … that releasing these photos would inflame anti-American opinion and allow our enemies to paint United States troops with a broad, damning and inaccurate brush, thereby endangering them in theaters of war.”

The president previously supported disclosure of the abuse photos, before reversing his position in May after consulting with military brass.

Obama’s sentiments were echoed by Department of Justice attorneys.

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source: MSNBC/ Associated Press (AP)

Researchers probe possible small spike in immune system cancer rate

Researchers say a small number of young law enforcement officers who participated in the World Trade Center rescue and cleanup operation have developed an immune system cancer.

The numbers are tiny, and experts don’t know whether there is any link between the illnesses and toxins released during the disaster.

But doctors who coordinated the study, published Monday in the Journal of Occupational and Environmental Medicine, said people who worked at the site should continue to have their health monitored.

“What we are trying to get out there is: Be alert,” said Dr. Jacqueline M. Moline, director of the World Trade Center Medical Monitoring and Treatment Program at the Mount Sinai School of Medicine.

The researchers looked at 28,252 emergency responders who spent time amid ground zero dust and found eight cases of multiple myeloma.

Those findings were no surprise. Multiple myeloma is the second most common hematological cancer in the U.S. after non-Hodgkin’s lymphoma. Normally, researchers would expect to find about seven cases in a group as large as the one examined in the study.

However, four of the people who fell ill were under age 45, and multiple myeloma is thought to be more rare among people of that age. Under normal circumstances, researchers would have expected to find only one case of the disease in that age group.

Those four young multiple myeloma patients included one officer who was caught in the dust cloud on 9/11 and then spent months working long hours at the site. Another spent 111 days at the Staten Island landfill where the rubble was sifted. Two others had less exposure, working 12 and 14 days each in the pit and rubble pile.

The study said it is possible the monitoring program was simply more effective at finding the illness among people who wouldn’t ordinarily be subjected to intense medical tracking.

Nevertheless, Moline said, “You shouldn’t be seeing so many cases of myeloma in younger folks.” The median age of diagnosis for that cancer in the general public is 71.

Several groups are studying New Yorkers exposed to toxic dust when the skyscrapers collapsed.

To date, no study, including the one published Monday, has established a link between that dust and cancer, said Lorna Thorpe, a deputy commissioner and epidemiologist at New York City’s health department.

The timing of the four cases examined by the team at Mount Sinai also raised questions about whether they are related to their work at ground zero, she said.

Most research on multiple myeloma indicates that it usually takes 10 to 20 years for someone to develop that cancer after an environmental exposure to a carcinogen.

In these cases, the cancers were diagnosed in as little as three to four years after the attacks, suggesting that something else caused the disease.

© 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

URL: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/32349670/ns/health-cancer/

source: The Nation

by Jeremy Scahill

Just days before two former Blackwater employees alleged in sworn statements filed in federal court that the company’s owner, Erik Prince, “views himself as a Christian crusader tasked with eliminating Muslims and the Islamic faith from the globe,” the Obama administration extended a contract with Blackwater for more than $20 million for “security services” in Iraq, according to federal contract data obtained by The Nation. The State Department contract is scheduled to run through September 3. In May, the State Department announced it was not renewing Blackwater’s Iraq contract, and the Iraqi government has refused to issue the company an operating license.

“They are still there, but we are transitioning them out,” a State Department official told The Nation. According to the State Department, the $20 million represents an increase on an aviation contract that predates the Obama administration.

Despite its scandal-plagued track record, Blackwater (which has rebranded itself as Xe) continues to have a presence in Iraq, trains Afghan forces on US contracts and provides government-funded training for military and law enforcement inside the United States. The company is also actively bidding on other government contracts, including in Afghanistan, where the number of private contractors is swelling. According to federal contracting records reviewed by The Nation, since President Barack Obama took office in January the State Department has contracted with Blackwater for more than $174 million in “security services” alone in Iraq and Afghanistan and tens of millions more in “aviation services.” Much of this money stems from existing contracts from the Bush era that have been continued by the Obama administration. While Obama certainly inherited a mess when it came to Blackwater’s entrenchment in Iraq and Afghanistan, he has continued the widespread use of armed private contractors in both countries. Blackwater’s role may be slowly shrinking, but its work is continuing through companies such as DynCorp and Triple Canopy.

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source: Raw Story

by David Edwards and Muriel Kane

Since the revelation earlier this week of allegations by two former employees of security firm Blackwater that its owner was complicit in murder in order to cover up the deliberate killing of Iraqi civilians, explosive charges have continued to emerge.

Perhaps the most shocking of those charges — quoted by MSNBC’s Keith Olbermann on Thursday from the employees’ sworn declarations — is that Blackwater was guilty of using child prostitutes at its compound in Baghdad’s fortified Green Zone and that owner Erik Prince knew of this activity and did nothing to stop it.

The declarations describe Blackwater as “having young girls provide oral sex to Enterprise members in the ‘Blackwater Man Camp’ in exchange for one American dollar.” They add even though Prince frequently visited this camp, he “failed to stop the ongoing use of prostitutes, including child prostitutes, by his men.”

One of the statements also charges that “Prince’s North Carolina operations had an ongoing wife-swapping and sex ring, which was participated in by many of Mr. Prince’s top executives.”

According to the two former employees, Blackwater supervisors in Iraq sometimes sent men back to the United States for wanting to “kill ragheads,” excessive drinking, steroid use, or failure to follow weapon safety procedures, but “Mr. Prince and his executives would send them back” with a reprimand to the supervisor for costing the firm money. Blackwater even fired “those mental health professionals who were not willing to endorse deployments of unfit men.”

The former employees additionally state that Prince was engaged in illegal arms dealing, money laundering, and tax evasion, that he created “a web of companies in order to obscure wrong-doing, fraud, and other crimes,” and that Blackwater’s chief financial officer had “resigned … stating he was not willing to go to jail for Erik Prince.”

Prince has repeatedly insisted his company has done nothing wrong and Blackwater — now renamed Xe — continues to fulfill its contracts with the United States government.

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source: Agence France-Presse
via: Raw Story

WASHINGTON — President Barack Obama is replacing the “global war on terror” with a new strategy more narrowly focused on Al-Qaeda and relying more on a broader effort to engage the Muslim world, a top aide said Thursday.

John Brennan, Obama’s chief counter-terrorism advisor, said Al-Qaeda remains a “persistent and evolving threat” to the United States and is being aggressively targeted by the new administration.

“But describing our efforts as a ‘global war’ only plays into the warped narrative that Al-Qaeda propagates,” Brennan said in comments prepared for delivery to a think tank here.

“It plays into the misleading and dangerous notion that the US is somehow in conflict with the rest of the world,” he said.

He said Obama was bringing to the issue “a fundamentally new and more effective approach” by attacking the longer-term problem of Muslim extremism through diplomacy and political and economic strategies.

“Indeed, the counterinsurgency lessons learned in Iraq and Afghanistan apply equally to the broader fight against extremism: we cannot shoot ourselves out of this challenge,” he said.

“We can take out all the terrorists we want — their leadership and their foot soldiers. But if we fail to confront the broader political, economic, and social conditions in which extremists thrive, then there will always be another recruit in the pipeline, another attack coming downstream,” he said.

Brennan outlined ambitious goals for promoting economic and political development in poor, conflict-ridden regions of the world as well diplomatic efforts to restore US standing among Muslims.

His speech came on the anniversary of a 2001 US intelligence warning famously ignored by then president George W. Bush which said Al-Qaeda leader Osama bin Laden was plotting attacks on the United States.

“President Obama is under no illusions about the imminence and severity of this threat,” Brennan said. “Indeed, he has repeatedly and forcefully challenged those who suggest that this threat has passed.”

Brennan invoked his own credentials as a longtime CIA officer who served as the agency’s station chief in Saudi Arabia to defend Obama against critics who have questioned his commitment to the fight against terrorism.

“Over the past six months we have presented President Obama with a number of actions and initiatives against Al-Qaeda and other terrorist groups.

“Not only has he approved these operations, he has encouraged us to be even more aggressive, even more proactive, and even more innovative, to seek out new ways and new opportunities for taking down these terrorists before they can kill more innocent men, women, and children,” he said.

Brennan said Al-Qaeda and its affiliates were “under tremendous pressure.”

“After years of US counterterrorism operations, and in partnership with other nations, Al-Qaeda has been seriously damaged and forced to replace many of its top-tier leadership with less experienced and less capable individuals,” he said.

“Nevertheless, Al-Qaeda has proven to be adaptive and highly resilient and remains the most serious terrorist threat we face as a nation,” he added.

“The group’s intent to carry out attacks against the United States and US interests around the world — with weapons of mass destruction if possible — remains undiminished, and another attack on the US homeland remains the top priority for the Al-Qaeda senior leadership,” he said.

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