Tag: advisors

Must we have a new government before war crimes prosecution for torture ?

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The Central Intelligence Agency’s health professionals repeatedly criticized the agency’s post-Sept. 11 interrogation program, but their protests were rebuffed by prominent outside psychologists who lent credibility to the program, according to a new report.

The 542-page report, which examines the involvement of the nation’s psychologists and their largest professional organization, the American Psychological Association, with the harsh interrogation programs of the Bush era, raises repeated questions about the collaboration between psychologists and officials at both the C.I.A. and the Pentagon.

The report, completed this month, concludes that some of the association’s top officials, including its ethics director, sought to curry favor with Pentagon officials by seeking to keep the association’s ethics policies in line with the Defense Department’s interrogation policies, while several prominent outside psychologists took actions that aided the C.I.A.’s interrogation program and helped protect it from growing dissent inside the agency.

A 542-page report concludes that prominent psychologists worked closely with the C.I.A. to blunt dissent inside the agency over an interrogation program that is now known to have included torture. It also finds that officials at the American Psychological Association colluded with the Pentagon to make sure the association’s ethics policies did not hinder the ability of psychologists to be involved in the interrogation program.

The association’s ethics office “prioritized the protection of psychologists — even those who might have engaged in unethical behavior — above the protection of the public…”

Two former presidents of the psychological association were on a C.I.A. advisory committee, the report found. One of them gave the agency an opinion that sleep deprivation did not constitute torture, and later held a small ownership stake in a consulting company founded by two men who oversaw the agency’s interrogation program, it said.

The association’s ethics director, Stephen Behnke, coordinated the group’s public policy statements on interrogations with a top military psychologist, the report said, and then received a Pentagon contract to help train interrogators while he was working at the association, without the knowledge of the association’s board. Mr. Behnke did not respond to a request for comment…

After the Hoffman report was made public on Friday, the American Psychological Association issued an apology.

RTFA. Long, it details the collusion between the APA and the Pentagon, torture programs, cover-ups.

Aside from scum like Dick Cheney who advocate torture, we still have a White House which alternates between ignoring opportunities to prosecute war crimes committed in our name – and letting reports like this lie fallow if not hidden away from the public.

Like many, I do not expect Congress to do their duty and support war crimes prosecution; but, the difference between words and deeds from the White House on this question stinks on ice.

George W. Bush ain’t exactly the ghost of Xmas Past for Scrooge Romney

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Mitt Romney has a George W. Bush problem.

In fact, that’s Romney’s biggest problem. It’s George W. Bush, not Barack Obama, who has made voters skeptical of many of Romney’s core policies. It’s George W. Bush, not Obama campaign strategist David Plouffe, who persuaded voters that our economic troubles aren’t mainly Obama’s fault. And so it is, in a sense, the electorate’s lingering fear of George W. Bush, as much as its residual affection for Barack Obama, that Romney needs to beat if he’s to become president.

At Tuesday’s debate, Romney was given a chance to do just that. A voter from Nassau County stood up and asked: “Governor Romney, I am an undecided voter, because I’m disappointed with the lack of progress I’ve seen in the last four years. However, I do attribute much of America’s economic and international problems to the failings and missteps of the Bush administration. Since both you and President Bush are Republicans, I fear a return to the policies of those years should you win this election. What is the biggest difference between you and George W. Bush, and how do you differentiate yourself from George W. Bush?”…

Romney devoted the first bit of his answer to the previous question about contraception. Only later did he turn to address the central question about his candidacy: “Let me come back and answer your question,” he said. “President Bush and I are — are different people and these are different times and that’s why my five-point plan is so different than what he would have done.”

Notice what he didn’t say there. He didn’t say that Bush had gotten anything wrong before leaving office as one of the most unpopular presidents in history. He didn’t say, “You’re right to be skeptical of Republicans, because we didn’t live up to your expectations last time.” He said, rather, “Have you heard about my five-point plan?”…

Romney offered precisely nothing that Bush wouldn’t have proposed in 2000. And Romney left out some of his more salient agreements with Bush. For instance, both the Enron debacle and the financial crisis happened on Bush’s watch. As a result, Congress passed the Sarbanes-Oxley and, later, Dodd-Frank laws to toughen financial regulation. But Romney has proposed rolling back both…

2012 is not 2000. We have deficits rather than a balanced budget. We have historically high unemployment rather than historically low unemployment. We’ve seen what the financial system can do when left unchecked. We’ve watched tax cuts in 2001 and 2003 fail to spark economic growth and seen a rising stock market fail to lift middle-class wages. We do need new thinking. But Romney isn’t offering any.

One reason you won’t see any differences in the worst plans offered by Romney is his advisors are exactly the same people that did the grunt work for Bush. From John Bolton advocating foreign policy roughly akin to Attila the Hun to Glen Hubbard who laid out Bush’s tax cuts and now proposes screwing things up about 400% worse – it’s the same old song.

Obama picks scientists to advise on science – Good Grief!

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President-elect Barack Obama has underscored his intent to push initiatives on climate change by naming John Holdren, an energy and climate specialist, as the new White House science adviser.

Holdren is a Harvard University physicist who has focused on the causes and consequences of climate change and advocated policies aimed at sustainable development. He has also done extensive research on the dangers of nuclear weapons…

Holdren, who teaches at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, will head the White House Office of Science and Technology Policy. He is a former president of the American Association for the Advancement of Science…

Obama has named Steven Chu, winner of the 1997 Nobel Prize in physics who was an early advocate for finding scientific solutions to climate change, to head the Energy Department…

In addition to the pick of Holdren, Obama also announced that marine ecologist Jane Lubchenco of Oregon State University would be his nominee for head of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

RTFA. As someone who supports scientific analysis and methodology, as an individual who would break down ideological fluff and pare it from real-world, real-time questions, I welcome at least the opportunity for science-based analysis in our next administration.

My peers who confuse sophistry with skepticism and weigh the ideology of pundits above peer-reviewed research – will wax nostalgic for the Bush days of easy targets and no legitimate science contradicting their skepticism.

Pentagon advisors: End the spending spree!

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A senior Pentagon advisory group, in a series of bluntly worded briefings, is warning President-elect Barack Obama that the Defense Department’s current budget is “not sustainable,” and he must scale back or eliminate some of the military’s most prized weapons programs.

The briefings were prepared by the Defense Business Board, an internal management oversight body. It contends that the nation’s recent financial crisis makes it imperative that the Pentagon and Congress slash some of the nation’s most costly and troubled weapons to ensure they can finance the military’s most pressing priorities.

Those include rebuilding ground forces battered by multiple tours to Iraq and Afghanistan and expanding the ranks to wage the war on terrorism.

“Business as usual is no longer an option,” according to one of the internal briefings prepared in late October for the presidential transition, copies of which were provided to the Globe. “The current and future fiscal environments facing the department demand bold action…”

Pentagon insiders and defense budget specialists say the Pentagon has been on a largely unchecked spending spree since 2001 that will prove politically difficult to curtail but nevertheless must be reined in.

Most important quote from the article? “A few cuts here or there won’t do the trick.”

No kidding. RTFA. It’s long and ain’t any of it out of line with common sense. Another quality missing these past seven years.