NYT: False Banality Is Not Evil
The NYT is awed by the meticulous bureaucracy the Bush Administration imposed on its torture regime, suggesting that banality somehow makes torture right.
The first news reports this week about hundreds of pages of newly released documents on the C.I.A. program focused on aberrations in the field: threats of execution by handgun or assault by power drill; a prisoner lifted off the ground by his arms, which were tied behind his back; another detainee repeatedly knocked out with pressure applied to the carotid artery.
But the strong impression that emerges from the documents, many with long passages blacked out for secrecy, is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of overwhelming control exercised from C.I.A. headquarters and the Department of Justice — control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal.
Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned.
But the NYT has been, sadly, snookered by a spectacular–but deceptive–display of bureaucracy.
That’s true, first of all, for the same reason that the abundance of details in the CIA torture documents have always been deceptive. We’ve known since April that all the details that John Yoo put into the original Bybee memo did nothing to to ensure that those details would be followed. The details Shane and Mazzetti boast of are all requirements put into place as it became clear that that the torture program was out of control. Yet given the absence of another IG review of the torture program–or better yet, an independent assessment from an outsider–there’s no reason to believe that the two weeks training that CIA eventually required of its interrogators would guarantee that they performed the interrogations as the detailed requirements laid out. In other words, the NYT is confusing documents prescribing certain actions with actions themselves–and no one, as far as I know, has done a review to see whether the actions matched the detailed procedures laid out in documents.
And then there’s the presentation of these details with little context with regards to time, as if there wasn’t a history of the CIA fudging the details. There is evidence, for example, that the CIA relied on one description of waterboarding but got approval for a completely different one. There is evidence they expanded on the initial authorization for torture by working with a free-lancing John Yoo, rather than OLC formally. Once it became clear what the CIA had done with the Bybee Two memo, OLC started asking for requests in detail, in writing, every time CIA wanted advice. OLC had to make such requests repeatedly. There was a fairly arbitrary playing with those details, presumably so OLC could prove it had been strict with the CIA. Yet the NYT would have you believe that the details prove CIA was operating in good faith and rationally.
Then there are the details with which NYT leads its article: limits on ambient light, white noise.
Two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs — no more, no less — illuminated each cell, 24 hours a day. White noise played constantly but was never to exceed 79 decibels.
NYT gets so entranced with the details that it seems to miss the kabuki that is going on here–these details and these techniques are, one by one, being presented as security necessities rather than–as they explicitly were deemed earlier in the torture program–methods to impose learned helplessness through sensory deprivation. And so the CIA distracts two professional reporters with two 17-watt bulbs who apparently do not notice that the program remains one about imposing arbitrary power rather than eliciting real cooperation.
Yet all the bureaucratic niceties in the world does not make torture right.
Err, the Nazis were very scrupulous and precise in their management, bookkeeping and execution of torture and extermination, too.
Dear NYT: did that evident care and precision make their conduct any less evil? Or are you just spreading more Establishment disinformation (a/k/a manure)?
Oh, yeah. The thing is, in a court, such a level of bureaucracy impose on a torture regime (or any other program, whether one of torture or not) supports only one conclusion: that this was no set of bad apples leaving the reservation but rather was a carefully orchestrated, centrally coordinated, planned, and carried out operation. Since it was, after all, illegal (in spades), such a carefully orchestrated, centrally coordinated, planned and carried-out operation, that is also known in the law as a “Criminal conspiracy”.
Indeed.
From Justice Robert H. Jackson, chief US prosecutor at Nuremberg, in his opening statement at the Trial of Major War Criminals (trial #1), pp. 101-102:
(More on Jackson and Holder in yesterday’s post at FDL.)
You can see why, therefore, it was important that the videotapes of the interrogations disappear. With his expanded mandate, I hope that Durham can unearth how that came to have occured.
I guess the NYT’s hasn’t figured out that it was torture first and then cover your ass second.
Yeah, as you say, they didn’t always follow even their warped rules.
I guess the Times missed that bit. I have a diary on it and how it fingers Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez as ordering torture that wasn’t justified even under the OLC guidance.
True evil is always cloaked with banality. That’s what is so dangerous about it. C. S. Lewis pretty much set forth the blueprint to watch out for when he wrote The Screwtape Letters over sixty years ago.
I’m going to bring this up again. Take a look at certification form. Sure, it’s probably from 2004 or earlier, but still it says start date 16 Nov and certification date 18 Nov. At some point, it only took two days to become a certified torturer.
Maybe it took that long because the bureaucracy required the training program to account for the initial indoctrination sessions & all elements of graduation, including the banquet & post-ceremonial bacchanal.
What a coinky-dink.
Two days is exactly how long it took Jeff Gannon/Jim Guckert, moonlighting manwhore to attain his Certificate of Journalism from Morton Blackwell’s Leadership Institute.
That and fiddy dollahs.
That is one depressing form.
The most hideous evil always is hidden in banality. Hannah Arendt saw this very well in her profile of Adolf Eichmann.
Slavery in its day was banal. So was segregation. So was rising empire. And so were the Indian Wars.
Contrary somewhat to the theme of fearless leader’s post, I actually think the Grey Lady’s answer to Mousepiece Theater, tweedledum Shane and tweedledummer Mazzetti, had Hannah Arendt’s famous observation in mind when they wrote this piece.
Part of the problem, IMO, is the Keller-lead regime of ensuring these two get a daily dose of multiple blows to the brainpan from the on-site HeSaid/SheSaid hammer; their ‘message’, to the extent it might be suggested they may have started out committed to one, ends up as dilute KoolAid, AOT from their resort to the usual line-up of sourcing suspects. Their inability to stick with any rationally connected group of the several large ‘hooks’ they’ve chosen to use leaves the reader to insert whatever message she or he wishes. In the end, just like the WaPo teenydick squad, they leave lots of openings for principled observers to turn their piece –and themselves– into clown-faced punching bags.
Maybe, but when I read this level of detail:
I find it impossible not to believe that at some point Cheney, Addington, Gonzo, probably Card, Bush, and heaven only knows who else were viewing torture either on tape, or in ‘real time’. How is it possible to achieve this level of detail — thereby bleaching the Bigger Picture out by means of obsessing on details — without going over the videotape. OR without supposing that ‘higher ups’ were also watching?
Sure; but I don’t think this refutes my point on the piece: it rides a lot of horses.
Agree; it’s a herd of horses.
Mine doesn’t refute yours; probably adds another mare to the herd.
I think you guys need to go to a predator collection instead of a prey collection – maybe a pack of wolves or a team of lawyers.
You definitely have a point 8-0
Had they done something to undercut the straight narrative —at least said “legalistic” instead of legal, or better yet rounded out that part of their article by referring to some of the historical and fictional parallels* brought up here— I too might’ve been tempted to consider that they were just being, you know, prostrate.
But no, I think EW’s nailed them here. They don’t have the track record for subtlety.
——
* Also include the film Brazil, in which all the seemingly ridiculous aspects of victims’ interactions with the police apparatus that are depicted were actually culled by Gilliam and his collaborators from then-current and recent practices of various torture states in the world. That includes such obscene japes as “information retrieval” [torture] charges, which were assessed on the basis of itemized lists such as in the training cert Ockham linked; I know independently that one or more of the Condor regimes did this. Et cetera.
That certification form has one technique that was intialized as training completed redacted.
O/T, but not by much: An old “friend” returns to the news.
Source: Duke Cunningham Pushed for Assassinations
By Jeff Stein | August 23, 2009 11:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
“Former California Rep. Randall “Duke” Cunningham, convicted on charges of taking bribes to steer CIA contracts to friends, constantly badgered intelligence officials to develop assassination teams, says a usually reliable source who says he was present during the confrontations.”
More.
Coinky dink you should post that,fatster.
You might want to go over to the Seminal,and check out Jim White’s thread about Cofer Black and Jose Rodriguez.
There’s some info on Porter Goss, Cunningham, and Wilkes that may interest you.
From the reports I noticed that the Office of Medical Services complained that they had no input on the standards and that external advisors were used to obtain the data on the baselines. Maybe it was CYA but the OMS stated that the criteria used in the water boarding was so different from the method used in SERE in duration, application and intensity that they were not even reasonably called the same procedure. The academic contacted regarding sleep deprivation stated that his research was grossly distorted. The caloric levels were developed as a minimum for individuals of lower weight who were not placed under the stresses of nudity, temperature stress, sleep deprivation, and other EIT procedures. They were being starved to death. It seems that most of these “limits” were the product of the “psychologists” and John Yoo’s own efforts at finding “the maximum that could reasonably be defended”.
The decibel levels allowed for “white noise” are essentially that of an individual standing next to a passing freight train. This was likely a transient level allowed for individuals without ear-protection. Woo allowed it for weeks at a time.Some of the levels were derived from “records” of endurance established under very controlled circumstances (or even with periodic “break periods” – allowed by Guiness).
The detainees were compelled to come into contact for 48 hour periods with their own feces and urine in a “diaper”. No doctor would recommend this as medically healthy. This is simply sadism. These people were being intentionally driven mad in a slow slide towards death.
Enormous damage flowing from “gung ho” or even banal operatives married to a well-oiled bureaucratic machine? Unglaublich, nicht Wahr?
It’s sad to see the Times’ perspective become this corrupt about something so vital to American society, its government and its future. The Times has much more to worry about than Jason Blair, Judy Miller or Rupert the Murdoch.
Agree completely. Hard to believe that this is the same paper that published the Pentagon Papers and pursued Nixon.
It isn’t the same. Only its name hasn’t changed. (Pls pardon the snark–not aimed at you at all. Just my sarcasm towards the NYT.)
Snark understood. I gave up a subscription to the Times when it was enthusiastically drumbeating for the Iraq war.
Thnx for assuring me.
Shane and Mazzetti: tin ears for history. We’re not looking at mere bureaucratic niceties here — there’s a lot of CYA, yes, but there’s also something that looks like bureaucratic OCD. It’s hard not to think that people who can get so deeply into meticulous tracking of sadistic detail without ever reflecting on the human realities being tracked are not in some way very sick.
Reporters for the NYT are staring at evidence of criminal behaviour, historically resonant evidence of criminal pathology, and they think it’s exculpatory?
We have a deep cultural problem here.
To say nothing of an ethical problem. How many times have I written or at least thought “The mind boggles” during my stay on this planet? Authors such as Vonnegut approached horrors such as what happened at Dresden (Slaughterhouse-Five) from the absurdist position in order to render them comprehensible.
Indeed we do! And not just at the NYT, I’m afraid.
Bob in HI
This reads like a plot synopsis for the next Eli Roth movie. The NYT has a predilection for torture-porn, who knew?
As if methodical documentation and process have never been used to dehumanize and eliminate humans before…
Like Hitler’s Nazis as mentioned already.
Or Pol Pot’s Khmer Rouge.
Or Pinochet’s Caravan of Death.
There is nothing new about this, only that the mainstream corporate media has not given this latest iteration of banal evil a name and label.
Like Cheney’s Torture and Assassination Team.
control Bush administration officials say was intended to ensure that the program was safe and legal.
I’m just totally blown away by the concept of safe and legal torture. Is there anything so incredible and offensive that Bush administration officials won’t say it? Rhetorical question.
First post here. There is no way not to go Godwin on this subject. It is exactly, with no exaggeration, the same as the Nuremberg defense. “Hey, it couldn’t be illegal! Look, we wrote it down!” What fools at CIA bought into this crap?
Well Hi There. I am your cheerful Emptywheel greeter (Wal-Mart laid me off) and I am here to welcome you. Stick around and comment often.
You went and said “union” again, didn’t you?
If it walks like Godwin, and it talks like Godwin . . .
Welcome!
The key to avoiding the invocation of Godwin’s Law is to keep the discussion on the specific parallels. Again from Justice Jackson’s opening statement at Nuremberg:
Change “Nazi police” to more contemporary groups (CIA interrogators? Military personnel? Blackwater contractors?) and it fits right in.
Apparently they let their hiring standards go down during the Reagan-Bush era…or, the Bushies simply told them “either do everything we tell you or you lose your job & retirement”. And, in typical Washington Villagers practice they protected themselves and spat on the Constitution.
At least it appears some of them did. How many complained?
BTW, from your handle I’d guess you have a very strong urge to follow the lead of others. Heh.
This is not intended to minimize the evil we are uncovering, but I am struck by the irony that we now have an answer to the question of how the many principled Germans, Argentines and Chileans were unable to alter the course of the Nazis, the Generals and Pinochet. The best we can hope for is to acknowledge our own failure (not through lack of effort) and seek to do justice for those who have been wronged by our government’s evil acts.
Wonderful insight. Do you mind if I steal that from you? (I’ll give credit.)
Yes, they owned up to their history; they faced it; and they got better (maybe not perfect, but better, which is as much as we can hope for from human beans).
Be my guest.
Answering your question is simple – fear and isolation.
You have to remember that, particularly in the context of the Nazis, the movement was a large mob which undertook not only to shout down any dissent, but also to corrupt the process of law enforcement such that Nazi violence against those who dissented from the Nazi program was acceptable, and dissenter violence against the Nazis was severely punished by the legal system, often in the name of “justice”. That, and a culture of informing on those who would organize to oppose the Nazi system. The movement was directed through the manipulation of mass media and particularly the use of skilled orators who could – using slogans or short catchphrases – direct the mob to move more or less as one, not unlike a school of fish. Intimidation is the coin of their realm. Here, we get wingnuts showing up carrying guns to public meetings. There, torchlight parades and massive paramilitary parades. Public beatings in both places.
Or, as was said by my landlady when I lived in Germany over 25 years ago, who had been an adult before WWII even began: “you have no idea what it was like to live under National Socialism”. Before she would begin weeping.
In that regard, I think it is quite clear that the current Republicans have, in fact, organized themselves along precisely those lines. Whether it was a conscious decision or not I think only history will be able to tell, but it is not surprising – never was – that in such an environment the same sorts of language cropped up coming from Republicans in contexts similar to places it cropped up in Nazi Germany. And this from people with no knowledge (at least AFAIK) of the German language.
For instance:
1. we have heard how many times Alberto Gonzales and others referred to the Geneva Conventions and the protections they afforded prisoners and others as “quaint”. That same word – “quaint” (in German) – was used in documents dealing with the way the Nazis treated their captives (particularly from the Eastern Front) and was so used by people in analogous positions in their government.
2. “Enhanced Interrogation” techniques. The German words which mean Enhanced Interrogation were used by the Gestapo to describe their program of torture of their captives, particularly when they tortured them to obtain information.
I could go on. But, you get the point. The Republicans do not like being compared to Nazis, but if you can find people who lived through those days in Germany, they would concur that that is how the Republicans are organized, how they behave, how they think and how they act and how they will act.
Agree totally that totalitarian governments maintain power though isolation and intimidation of dissidents. So we can now relate in a small way to those who lived under those regimes.
Please do go on when you have time. It would make a fascinating diary.
Excellent post, EW! I read the syndicated column in the Oregonian this morning, along with a couple others on the torture issue, and thought it did seem as though Shane and Mazetti were not writing a straight news story.
They seemed more like deer in the proverbial headlights, or maybe “two 17-watt fluorescent-tube bulbs”!?
Maybe somebody needs to ask the Times why an administration that could do such meticulous record-keeping on war crimes was unable to manage it’s own email archiving system! And why, if the did such meticulous record-keeping, they erased the very tapes that would have kept an even better record? Erased tapes. Missing emails. NYTimes: Hint! Hint!
Why do these folks never put 2 and 2 together?
Perhaps, theraP, it is because the “job” of “these people” is 2 encourage everyone to 4-get?
DW
Bingo! Sigh…..
mary02: merci… I’ll check it out.
They do not put 2 and 2 together because that is not their job. As has become achingly clear over the past decade, their job is disinformation, in the guise of producing information.
Apologies to William Wordsworth
Press = stenographers.
Readers/Viewers = something like those geese that are force-fed to make the huge livers for pate.
Those of us who can still think are the outliers. Or is it out-liars, they see us as?
It’s true, they don’t think much of us. But then they don’t have to. They look at the $50 billion dollars the suckers give to the Pentagon’s black budget. That’s testimony to the seriousness of them, and the irrelevance of us.
I’m not saying I buy that point of view (except in my more gloomy, pessimistic moods), but you can certainly understand why they would tend to look down from their lofty heights, fifty billion steps high, upon us mere mortals. Add in their “warrior” ethos, and we might as well be living in a fascist country, and very well could be some day, should they discern that the proles have come to feel that freedom means one should demand what is rightly theirs, and that equality, justice, and liberty are a birthright, and not the warped simulacrum presented to the people today.
oligarchy
We iz the peons in it!
It’d be easy to give into the notion that money is power, and that USD50 billion is a giant which will stomp us.
But then I recall the essay, The Cathedral And The Bazaar, and I remember even Goliath could be felled.
Excellent!!! Jeff, damned excellent!
When the CIA was being “built”, in 1947, there was genuine concern, long extinct I fear, that the CIA could become a US president’s Gestapo were it to be run out of the White House and were a president “imperially” inclined. The original fire-walls have failed (deliberately “under-engineered”, one imagines, from the start).
And “that” community, which you describe, in its upper reaches, for all its “intelligence”, may very well have considerable disdain for the mere citizenry, the “people” who owe so much to those of the “warrior” class, their self-considered betters (certain things come to mind, unbidden …).
DW
That ties as well to the post by the penquinposter a few threads back about where loyalties and allegiances really lie, and why and to what has struck me over and over about the way the lawyers at DOJ have operated. It’s a club and there are special rules if you are in the club. Obama could have been the challenge to that, but he opted out.
No need to apologize to Wordsworth. He’d understand.
TheraP, see Washington Independent article by Spencer Ackerman about conflict of interest for psychologist/torturer. He speculates it was Mitchell. Very similar to what you were saying yesterday.
From the NYTimes article:
Perhaps Ensure Plus should make an ad campaign: Approved by High Value Detainees everywhere! The Freedom Drink tm!
My reaction was a little different. The title really should have been: Report shows tight control over CIA interrogations. Point being, the CIA did what they were told, and were immaculately professional about it. So any fingers to be pointed, or investigations launched, should be directed to the place they belong.
This is an evil article, one that reveals the fact the moral anchors have come completely loose. It won’t help you, Shane and Mazzetti, to place those quotes from ACLU and Amnesty.
They did their research, after all, even looked at a textbook! My, my.
These doctors are war criminals, having broken every code of ethics a medical professional could follow. And you, Shane and Mazzetti, are not simply blind or fuzzed out. You know the story very well. One cannot pretend neutrality here. The whole purpose of your article is to back the claim that the Bush administration bureaucracy — “managers, doctors and lawyers” — did their due diligence, in order “to use the ‘least coercive measure’ to achieve the goal [of prisoner cooperation].
“Waterboarding might be an excruciating procedure with deep roots in the history of torture…” (emphasis added) — if you are not enablers, Shane and Mazzetti, then you are two of the stupidest people to walk this planet.
Hypothermia research, the best available information on recovery methods, data on survival times in cold water, has always been a bit problematic.
Yes, the whole survival hypothermia project was born at Dachau.
But all the data they use in these “memos” are suspect, and none more so that the effects of the SERE training techniques upon subjects.
God, I’ll have to get that article out soon!
I can’t imagine how that could be – after all, when the CIA operative role played Sigmund Rascher in Afghanistan, it’s not like his 20ish yo human for experiementation died or anything – after all, if that had happened I’m sure it would be the kind of crime that wouldn’t be redacted in the IG report and I’m sure that the DOJ would have revisited the reliability of their hypothermia torture advice and …
never mind
The real trick is that they’ve learned how to make non-detainees engage in self directed walling.
That Times article from 1990 is better on the medical ethics than the quality of the Nazi experiments. That they were morally and literally fatally flawed is without question, as is that the raw data was destroyed and that the methodology was often flawed. That they produced incorrect results remains highly debatable. It’s also moot. Explorations of the same phenomena have been repeated through ethically appropriate experiments and come to similar conclusions. See generally, the work of K.J. Collins, MB, BSc, DPhil, FRCP.
I had this very weird experience last night. My wife (who is a physician) just went off when somebody on the tv started making excuses for the doctor who treated Michael Jackson. “Doctors are not pushers. IV meds to help somebody get to sleep!? He had a moral duty…” are the only parts I’ll repeat in print. I was stunned because she is not a Michael Jackson fan (in her view, he’s just a pedophile). Then, I realized that to her the only way to be worthy of the power she has as a physician is to understand that that moral duty extends to anybody in her care without exception.
And I wonder how those physicians who enabled the torture can live with themselves.
I agree completely with your wife.
It is interesting to compare the position of a physician to that of a psychologist. The physician can reduce the patient to a body or group of organ systems, the better to remove themselves from personal feelings. A psychologist, working without benefit of medicalizing a person’s problems to mere physiology, confronts the person qua human being, as a whole living member of society. If you remember the Sopranos, you might remember the discussion between the psychiatrist and her supervisor re her feelings about Tony, and his warnings to her, and her ambivalence.
It is far harder, I believe, to turn off one’s humanity to another soul if you are treating them in psychotherapy. Even when one is conducting an assessment, the psychologist walks a fine line, because his or her job is to understand and explain a person’s life and personality. The more removed one becomes from the person, the less valid the report becomes. Get too close, and you lose objectivity. – To do the assessment on AZ (presumably done by Mitchell, but we really don’t know; it could have been another hack), the psychologist reduces the human being to a thing, a mere object of propaganda, a vessel into which one pours pain, with interest only in breaking the vessel apart.
On a lighter side, perhaps some folks here remember the hilarious 60s film, The President’s Analyst.
EFF might agree that the it’s all about the android from the phone company, as well as the guy he gives his information to.
The one where The Phone Company is recording and analyzing all calls in the US? Yes, I watched that remarkably prescient thing just last week.
Ditto with lawyers. But DoJ lawyers are not the president’s or, more precisely, the vice president’s legal hit team; they represent the people and the government of the United States. The OLC and Yoo and Bybee in particular abused their authority and failed in their legal as well as their moral duty.
They internalized the Skilling Rule, which he used so audaciously at Enron that it almost worked: “Nothing is illegal until the government catches me and makes me stop; if my lobbyists prevent that from ever happening, whatever I did was “legal” and I won.” George Bush really did bring to government the best management practices today’s private sector has to offer.
What was clear to me from the beginning and what seems doubly confirmed here is that once y’all leave international law aside and dump the Geneva Conventions into the trashcan and replace it all with a necessarily secret program, it becomes impossible to enforce any meaningful rules. How can one possibly enforce any humanitarian ideas when the rules are ad hoc, thought up bit by bit and improvised on the fly?
To say nothing of the fact that they weren’t designed to get truly useful information to begin with, but to get false confessions!
I believe the term is “setting up for failure.”
NYT: complicit in war crimes; read at your own risk.
Torture: war crime; discuss pros & cons only as a criminal defense.
Law: useful to control the masses
U.S. Presidency: puppet position for scofflaw int’l power structure
CIA: hit team for scofflaw int’l power structure
U.S. Congress: soft impenetrable buffer separating masses from int’l power structure
U.S. Courts: bypassed by ips wherever possible; otherwise, rigged & packed to max feasible extent
The Press: dedicated propaganda for ips
Marcy, I am often surprised and disappointed that NYT is quoted/analysed here as if it is or has been a credible source. Their MSNishness has not been new or remarkable for many years now; how about tossing them out back with the other worthless rags.
Well said!
Uh, that’s pretty much the way in which Marcy approaches much of the reporting at the Times. But she doesn’t toss it out — she carefully dissects it to see who is pushing what funny story, to see what’s going on behind the curtains and under the table.
Google “emptywheel Judy Miller” and see what you get.
Or you could just ask Scooter Libby.
I get your point. One argument is in favor of taking time and effort to dissect this article and expose its gory guts (Marcy’s approach) and the other (mine) is to refuse to grant a response to its ridiculous-but-serious-sounding tone and content.
I get the same discomfort when Keith Olbermann shows pics of Cheney night after night, or that bloviating radio wingnut, or his other enemies from Fox. It gives them free exposure, teevee time which could be much better used if the objective were to enlighten the masses. An occasional droll remark about that nutzo old ex-VP, or that fat lying radio bs artist, without pictures or discussion etc. would work much better at marginalizing IF that is what he wants.
I’ll admit that I have no data to back a claim that ignoring a celeb works as intended but it still seems like a good idea. One risk is that a failure-to-confront can be seen as surrender.
I wonder why we are told the brand name of Ensure Plus, the dietary drink fed to the high value detainees. We are never told the brand names of other items – the brand name of the towels used for the wall slam, or the maker of the orange outfits. This kind of publicity can’t be good for the manufacturers and sellers of Ensure Plus. By bidding for contracts to feed the high value detainees, are the makers of Ensure Plus (Abbott Nutrition) participating at the periphery of a war crimes conspiracy?
from the Abbott website:
maybe it’s more of a “Kleenex” thaang
Yeh but … more than that, it is the way the writer makes sure the reader understands that *we’re taking care of these folks, see. No starvation in our camps, nosirree*.
oh sure, I was just commenting on the use of the brand name. Restricting detainees to “Ensure” is barbaric and all but the same as starving them — more torture.
If you have the time look at a list of companies that were war profiteers and see if Abbott or Abbott’s parent company is among them. When looking at bottled water used for torture drownings after a report that the water bottles were pulled from a refrigerator instead of being room temperature per the toturers enablers scribbles, I noticed that Nestle is a profiteer and sells bottle water in Poland. But you won’t find Nestle mentioned anywhere.
My assumption is that you will find that Abbott received no no-bid contracts and thus their identity (and the identity of the contract giver, or Pentagon program outside of Congressional approval) is not protected.
Damn that’s a good question.
It also sort of reminds me of how we raise cows and chickens.
But I guess that’s the point.
Ensure really has taken on a “Kleenex” status in the product category. This I know from my mother’s later years and my daughter’s early ones. It is synonymous with that kind of liquid nourishment.
Each time I have seen info about the high value detainees’ food, “Ensure Plus” has been mentioned, with the word “Plus” which made me think it was the trade name rather than a generic term like “Kleenex”.
We’ve been told by released prisoners about bouts of constipation and diarrhea, which they said was intentionally induced by the food.
I would not have complained if we were told that the high value detainees ate MREs, or even the old fashioned “bread and water” diet. But putting them on a milk-shake diet is part of using basic nutrition as a coercive tool. I don’t mean merely the semi-starvation, but complete manipulation of their dietary intake, by the calorie, vitamins, minerals, etc.
As you hinted, it was more like feed than food. Except the intention was never to fatten them up for market.
OT: Hey! BMAz! It looks like the Redskins are going to have to deal with the Jessica-Simpson-in-a-jersey curse this year. Dallas ain’t getting off easy, though.
Yeah, but it is Colt Brennan, not the starter, Heck, Brennan may even be number 3 on the depth chart. Cannot be as much trouble as she caused Romo (witch notwithstanding of course).
All I know is I’m expecting a trash thread on Friday. We’re getting close enough, aren’t we?
Besides, BillBel used to get advice from Ted Kennedy.
Crikey, did Teddy call that pass play in the first game last year??
Hey, Colt Brennan is a Hero in Hawaii.
Give him a chance!
Bob from HI in AZ
Hey, ain’t me; talk to Jessica Simpson! (I wanted to fix Simpson up with Tom Brady).
Why do you hate Tom Brady so much ?
He’s hot, rich, talented, and look who he sleeps with every night. Hate his guts!
Well, I hear that when one supermodel is preggers with his child is the perfect time to lure him away with another supermodel.
I think as much as anything the story shows a misunderstanding of a) reliance opinions and b)the lawyering being done to try to piecemeal a “lack of specific intent” defense for the torturers.
Since they are getting at what these DOJ release show, I really think you are looking more at reliance opinion issues than even normal bureaucracy issues.
I know I’ve touched on reliance opinion issues from time to time, and not to beat a horse to death, but in order to even begin to think of using a legal opinion as a defense to a criminal charge, the opinion has to on its face clearly demonstrate that it was issued only after complete disclosure of all relevant facts. So references in the opinions (and in the less formal letters) to things such as how long someone is held underwater, how many calories, how cold, etc. are not in there bc lawyers were “dictating” all those facets of a detainee’s routine, but rather to establish the facts disclosed to the lawyers (so the lawyer there are stenographers, not dictators). The obsession was not with all those details vis a vis the detainee, it was with making sure the memos recited all the possible relevant facts forming the basis of the opinion.
I can’t really do great links off of google, but a halfway decent case in a securities setting on advice of counsel (and the problems with the 5th and using an advice of counsel defense) is this 6th circuit Lindo case
http://openjurist.org/18/f3d/353
The court chops what can be a much more complicated formula down to two parts bc that is all that is needed in the context of this opinion and those two parts are:
If they think the recitations of facts seem detailed and obsessive here, they should get access to some complex closing opinion of counsel, or a title opinion used for reliance in a commercial closing or for the drilling of a multi-million dollar well etc.
In any event, those opinions are not “portraits of overwhelming control” at all – they are standard issue (and to be honest, far too sketchy for a good reliance opinion) recitations of fact that you would have to have to express an opinion. And EW is not only dead right that the “parameters” in the documents were not being followed, the opinions themselves make it absolutely and positively clear that the issuers who are listing the facts precedent to the opinions have no oversight and control over what is going on, bc the opinions keep making the caveats that “oh, but guys, if anything you told me is wrong, then this opinion cannot be relied upon”
What we have now is a helluva lot of evidence that most things were wrong (with Rizzo primarily in the loop on that) and more to the point, that a LOT of HIGHLY RELEVANT information was not incorporated into or addressed by the opinions (things like the preliminaries, things like disappearances, things like kidnapping that does not fall under rendition decisions, things like threats to family, etc.)(and none of that can be tied on Rizzo’s tail bc the lawyers knew these were necessary parts of the due diligence picture and just didn’t want to deal with them and chose, knowingly, to skip over them).
Managers, doctors and lawyers not only set the program’s parameters but dictated every facet of a detainee’s daily routine, monitoring interrogations on an hour-by-hour basis. From their Washington offices, they obsessed over the smallest details: the number of calories a prisoner consumed daily (1,500); the number of hours he could be kept in a box (eight hours for the large box, two hours for the small one); the proper time when his enforced nudity should be ended and his clothes returned.
We also see a bizarre set of lawyering on “specific intent” aspects. First DOJ says that for all its 2340 & 2340A interpretations, it is teaching torture as a specific intent crime (I’m not going into the full ramifications on all of this, but just a short surface touch on what they are doing). Okayfine. Yoo and others try to say that means that if there is no proof that someone, at the instant they were torturing, specifically thought “hey, I am intending as I slam this naked, hypothermic, sleep deprived man whose family we have threatened and who we have disappeared off the face of the earth for months, as I slam him headfirst into a wall over and over, I am intending to torture him” then no one can charge them with torture. Which is nonsense, bc then you would never be able to convict anyone on a specific intent crime bc they would always say they were “intending” something else – – like the police in IL saying they were just trying to get information, not torture, in the Burge cases.
Levin takes on the standard more directly in his memo for Comey (I wish to God I’d never skimmed that creature and now I know sometime I’ll have to go back and really read it). He pretty much admits to the fact that no, you do have to realize that the torturers might be held to the kind of legal standards that would determine that they “intend” the natural and forseeable consequences of their acts no matter what words they mouth. So if natural consequences of the intended acts are torture, then you intend torture.
But wait! Levin has that one figured out. If yeah, normal non-DOJ type people would see a factual reecitation involving stripping and stress positions and humiliation and give it the pictures of Abu Ghraib and say – hell yes, someone doing those things to a human being is intending to torture that human being, there is STILL an “out.” That out would be to say, “well yeah, they thought so too, BUT you see, they “consulted” with “experts” who told them – golly kid, sheez no way, those guys like it when you kidnap ‘em, strip ‘em, drown ‘em, let me explain it kid, did ya ever see a commercial for barbecue, where the little piggies are just dancing their way into the ovens, it’s like that, they’re like the happy little piggies and you’re just the oven, no harm intended. “
He basically tries to lay out a list of things that someone could do, look at research in the field, consult with experts, etc. which are things they then try to recite was done in the opinion. In that way, they try to give a secondary out – not just that counsel gave advice but also that there could be no intent bc of other consultations on torture.
And that’s where things really fall apart. DOJ is saying in their “advice of counsel” opinion that THEY are relying not just on all these facts that aren’t so about how the torture is being done and the information the torture victims have, etc. but also that THEY (counsel) are themselves relying WITHOUT ANY INDEPENDENT RESEARCH on their clients assertions that the torture doesn’t, won’t and hasn’t had any physical or psychological long term effect. IOW, they try to buy DOJ out of conspiracy complicity by saying “we couldn’t have had any intent to conspire in something like torture, bc WE relied on experts who told US it wasn’t torture – you know, our clients who we were also giving an opinion of counsel that THEY could rely upon that what they were doing wasn’t torture …”
Argh.
The court left out
Yeah- and I’ve seen 5 and 6 part assessments (some even specifying that there has to also be a good faith believe that the lawyer is unbiased – in particular in wrongful detention cases)
There’s all kinds of reasons why these opinions don’t qualify for good faith reliance, but I also think it is important to know that they were trying to make them suit that purpose and that effort – to generate a reliance opinion – rather than any exercise of control over what was going on, is why you have a fact dense set of recitations. Any reliance opinion would have the same.
But not too many reliance opinions, though, rely on relying on the client’s ultimate determination. Hey, in addition to the facts that you have given us, we are also relying on YOU (via your docs, your psychs, your research into physiological and mental affects of your actions) for the ultimate legal DETERMINATION (this wasn’t torture bc you are telling us that YOUR consultants said it wasn’t torture, bc they are saying there’s no long term effect) and since we aren’t docs and would never think to go to someone expert in the torture field like ICRC to get info, that sounds okeydokey to us.
So it’s fact dense for it to resemble a reliance opinion and to kind of look like that is the defense that Holder is saying the “non-rogues” can assert (although things like the advice given before the actions, incorrect and incomplete facts, etc. are there for the non-rogue interrogators and would destroy the defense for them too) But it’s also fact dense to flesh out why both the interrogators AND the DOJ lawyers conspiring with them to set into motion the walling, hypothermia, etc. that supposedly was “awaiting” the lawyers’ approval to start (although we know that was incorrect too) would have an argument under the specific intent element of not only torture, but conspiracy to torture.
Check this out, I think you will find the discussion to your liking.
Ha! Got you thinking about it don’t I?
Masterful.
Sideways to topic
The International Federation of Journalists says the US military in Afghanistan is monitoring journalists to determine if they are or are not sympathetic to the US.
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200…..fghanistan
This is a “further to” story on the Bushie Rendon Group getting to take a Public Relations swipe at journos before they are cleared to be embeds.
I guess there’s always the chance that Shane and Marzetti were put through a similar “Cocktail Weenie” screening process. If so – they passed. They can now claim the right to inbed(sic) with the CIA.
The Grey Lady is still doing the gwb43 agit prop -sheesh you would haved thought that all that mess dear Judith left them with would have at least caused a pause in their collective mendacity and collusion with neocon perps …
Nazi’s meticulous record-keeping and regulations hanged them in the end.
Even with highly detailed lipstick a pig is still a pig.
“But the strong impression that emerges from the documents, many with long passages blacked out for secrecy, is by no means one of gung-ho operatives running wild. It is a portrait of “
Anyone see a problem with accurately describing something(anything) with “many long passages blacked out “. Was the NYT outfitted with special glasses? How do we get some for EW???
Thank you. I have been wearing a black armband since mid-May over my horror of living in a country that allowed these atrocities to happen, and that is not expressing more moral outrage over it. New Administration, Congress and citizenry. I listen to callers even on air america justifying torture and it stuns me.
The pathology is so profound. But we must face down evil, even though it is so hard to explore, our own sense of denial calling us away.
I think of Rumsfeld without honor, blaming the bad apples, letting the betrayed soldiers (one mainly and incredibly only one) languish in a cell over Abu Ghraib when Rumsfeld had been responsible for that behavior. Total invertebrate. There is a special section of hell for such people
I thought Hitler and Naziism was an anomaly, but not any more. The older I get I realize Joseph Heller, Ray Bradbury, and other such authors were not being hyperbolic describing surreal amorality. It thrives, sadly.
I wondered why this country was so mute about rape as a tool of war in Africa, etc. This country was perpetrating its own evil. No wonder we weren’t speaking out for evil farther away.
I think it is important to talk about American values in cases like this because the protection of civil liberties is entrusted to the people in the end. You see it all over the Federalist that the people are the last appeal against any great abuse of power: even if it might be possible, the people would never have stood for it before it got to that point. The national security and secrecy apparatus has gone so far beyond what Madison and Hamilton could imagine that the people don’t always catch it.
That said, it is important to remember the Nazis because it is a reminder that the worst can happen, that people can be that evil. It was helped along because the Germans never had much of a democratic tradition to start with, but for that very reason remembering the Nazis helps us to be vigilant about the erosion of the traditions that we have. So much of the stupid media shows a contempt for citizenship and for knowledge that indicates one kind of erosion.
This is quite right. And therein lies both the blessing and the curse.
Bob from HI in AZ
So agree. The eternal vigilance that Jefferson warned was needed.
Leadership makes a difference. During Watergate, we had Barbara Jordan on TV extolliing the value of the Constitution. Now, Congress is so complicit in the evil that we rarely hear much from them about the importance of Constitutional values. Instead, we get endless gossip about the infidelity of GOP congresspeople to their spouses.
There is a vacuum of Constitutional morality in Washington, and it hurts.
Bob from HI in AZ
They are swimming in an industrial strength kool-aid. And there is this team cronyism of both parties, but then there is a cronyism with the lobbyists and the corporate class, “incestuous cronyism” Dday at Digby’s blog once wrote. And even with thier “civility” now about Ted Kennedy… the affinity of civility… and goodwill and style of the civilized though an amorality rather than substance in communication. And the press is a faux teacher, a dark hypnotizer and source of disinformation or at best skewed values and priorities.
Meticulous details meant that the excerpts provided to Decider Bush were sufficiently titillating to meet his needs.
If they were so meticulous, how is it that they ‘lost’ detainees?
I guess the Times overlooked that little detail.
That’s an excellent point. All this is smoke meant to distract or convey an erroneous impression. It was still torture whether it was or was not bureaucratized, whether accurate records were or were not kept, or whether the torturers could keep their story straight or not. People were abused and murdered in these programs. Nor can any “end justifies the means” argument be raised in defense of them. No purpose was achieved or information gained, other than the one we already knew, that if you torture someone they will tell you, not what they know, but what you want to hear.
Yeah, they even had a hard time keeping track of their main source of intel on the al-Qaeda training camps in Iraq – surprise surprise when he showed in Libya. Dead.
The 100 doesn’t begin to cover the people they had the Pakistanis, Syrians, Egyptians, etc. handle. The records on those?
That was in the redacted sections.
So they didn’t have to account for it.
I thought the most significant detail was quoting Helgerson recommending not to prosecute in the accompanying story.
(EW probably already knows that there is a discussion of Fitzgerald about p. 230 in the Miers interview)
So who’s on the CIA payroll… Shane? Mazzetti? Both?? These hacks have made quite a career out of their ability to banal-ize blatantly illegal and inhumane practices by our intelligence services… One almost has to hope that at least they’re being compensated for their conveniently placed advocacy.
Mazzetti is certainly, um, very friendly with The Company.
Banal war criminals. Wow
The journalist has apparently managed to write an article about how “Managers, doctors and lawyers” and others are guilty of war crimes, without noticing.
The NYT detailing of torture details reads to me like “J’accuse”.
It is incontrovertible proof of official culpability in these crimes.
It means that prosecuting those below the official overseers is absurd.
I think you are right about the motivations behind all these guidelines and reviews. But, even if the bureaucracy was, in some twisted way, a sincere attempt to moderate the torture and to keep it somehow closer to legal conduct, the attempt only magnifies my revulsion.
When a criminal tortures another person in a fit of passion or compulsive perversion, he has at least some claim on my understanding. I don’t hold with the cliche about sex murderers being animals and predators. Such persons are all too human, with motivations that, though twisted, are closer than we think to those that drive all of us.
But a person who tortures for his job, because it is policy or because it is politically expedient, and then goes home to the wife and kiddies? That is something else again. I cannot feel the slightest empathy for such people.
Scott Peck says “a follower is never a whole person.”
I appreciate what you said.
could we just put state an evaluation of this article this way:
the new york times copied the gist of a previous wapoop story,
and adopted therein the wapoop “philosophy” of journalism, to whit,
authorize to be written that which benefits the corporation.
Well, gee, guys! I see the problem here, and it’s so obvious, I, I, well, I could just spit tacks thinking about how silly we look. You see, Shane and Mazetti? They writing about a DIFFERENT US torture program, not ours!
Well, of course! Our program was nothing like the ordered, rational regime they write about characterized by casual and indifferent sadism and rank lawlessness. No, our program, if you can call it that, was seat of the pants all the way! Why, I’m sure in the strictly administered and well communicated program upon which these writers report you wouldn’t have a situation where people in the field and stateside alike were thrown into situations unprepared and untrained and essentially forced to wing it, where instructions and orders on who was to do what were dispersed throughout personnel by rumors, innuendo and people following examples that were incorrect to begin with and still misunderstood.
I am so jealous! Oh, I wish we had a program that wasn’t designed for the lowest in rank to be punished for all the mistakes everyone makes.
In the sleek, hospital corners program THEY write about, could you imagine how much easier it was for the people running it. Why I’ll bet they didn’t make even one mistake in collecting detainees. Oh, yes, they probably had a 100% certainty policy so that they detained ONLY scumbags and they could go about their inhumane, illegal, deplorable treatment without a care in the world. Surgical strike-city. You betcha!
You can bet in Shane and Mazetti-land no one went off half-cocked and pulled an ”Abu Ghraib” on them. No, sir, these guys were pros and they obviously had some awesome management from the top. Where is this place anyway? Those folks are making us look bad.
Seriously, these guys write as though the JUST now started following the story. I know they are good journalists but this piece makes them look like feather-headed hacks!
If Mazzetti is not on the Agency payroll his
reportingrepeating, and thus his living, depends to a very heavy degree on his access to CIA off record sources. Its just all CIA spin.The Ensure discussion pertains to our country as well:
Update
Cruel and Unusual Punishment: Soy Diet for Illinois Prisoners
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Are Children Next Targets for Toxic Meals?
Washington, DC July 13, 2009: Citing serious health conditions due to high levels of soy, inmates in the Illinois prison system are suing for a permanent injunction against the substitution of soy for meat in prison meals.
The soy-based prison diet began when Rod Blagojevich was elected governor of Illinois in 2002. Beginning in January 2003, inmates began receiving a diet largely based on processed soy protein with very little meat. In most meals, small amounts of meat or meat by-products are mixed with 60-70 percent soy protein; fake soy cheese has replaced real cheese; and soy flour or soy protein is now added to most prison baked goods. Blagojevich received substantial campaign contributions from Archer Daniels Midland, the main supplier of soy products to the Illinois prisons.
Soy is touted as a way to save money and to provide a diet lower in calories and saturated fat. However, soybeans contain plant estrogens and other toxins and anti-nutrients that make soy products unacceptable as a source of nutrition except in very small amounts. The U.S. Food and Drug Administration (FDA) lists over 200 studies showing toxicity of soy in its Poisonous Plant Database (http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~djw/pltx.cgi?QUERY=soy). Although the FDA allowed a soy-prevents-heart disease health claim in 1999, the agency is considering revoking that claim in the face of evidence that soy does not lower cholesterol and does not prevent heart disease.
According to Sally Fallon Morell, president of the Weston A. Price Foundation, the organization began receiving letters from Illinois inmates in early 2008. The prisoners described deliberate indifference to a myriad of serious health problems caused by the large amounts of soy in the diet. Complaints include chronic and painful constipation alternating with debilitating diarrhea, vomiting after eating, sharp pains in the digestive tract after consuming soy, passing out, heart palpitations, rashes, acne, insomnia, panic attacks, depression and symptoms of hypothyroidism, such as low body temperature (feeling cold all the time), brain fog, fatigue, weight gain, frequent infections and enlarged thyroid gland.
The tack taken by the law firm isn’t particularly strong; they’d be much better off looking at the nutritive value of the entire diet and the likelihood of food allergies versus attacking soy.
Particularly since large swaths of Asian culture supplement their protein intake with soy-based foods and we don’t see them suffering from malnutrition — unless their entire diet is lacking in adequate nutrition.
There is the question of ADM’s contributions to Blago, but this practice is so widespread that I don’t think it’s going to be persuasive. Judges get political contributions from PACs too.
I personally find the claim that plant estrogens are toxins quite objectionable. There are studies which show phytoestrogens as being cancer-inhibiting, unlike synthetic xenoestrogens.
If you look at the science on the site, you’ll see the strength of their arguments.
———————————————–
For a list of 288 studies showing the toxicity of soy:
http://vm.cfsan.fda.gov/~djw/pltx.cgi?QUERY=soy
———————————————–
It has been argued that high levels of soy isoflavones such as genistein, daidzein and genistin in Asian diets protect the inhabitants of Japan and China from certain degenerative diseases, especially breast and prostate cancer. Actually, consumption of soy in traditional Asian diets is low. A 1975 report lists soyfoods as minor sources of protein in Japan and China.1 Major sources of protein listed were meat including organ meats, poultry, fish and eggs. Average isoflavone consumption in Asian diets ranges from 3-28 mg/day, as shown in the table below.
Studies indicate that isoflavone consumption at levels slightly exceeding those found in tradition diets results in thyroid suppression and endocrine disruption. The AdvantaSoyTMClearTM supplement would add 30-50 mg of isoflavones to a 100-gram serving of various common western foods, levels that exceed the amounts found in traditional diets and that are in the range of levels shown to cause problems, especially for sensitive individuals. Note that this level is also greater than the amount provided by 25 mg soy protein isolate, the amount determined by the FDA to warrant a health claim. It is not only possible but likely that many individuals will consume two or more servings of foods to which the Cargill isoflavones have been added, especially as these foods will be promoted with much advertising touting their health benefits. Two or more servings of such foods would provide 60-100 mg isoflavones per day, an amount that provides the estrogen equivalent of the contraceptive pill2 and one that clearly poses dangers after only a brief period of daily intake.
Isoflavones
China (1990 survey)3 3 mg/day
Japan (1996 survey)4 10 mg/day
Japan (1998 survey)5 25 mg/day
Japan (2000 survey)6 28 mg/day
In Japanese subjects receiving adequate iodine, causing thyroid suppression after 3months7 35 mg/day
In American women, causing hormonal changes after 1 month8 45 mg/day
In American women, causing changes presaging breast cancer after 14 days9 45 mg/day
FDA recommended amount10 24 mg/day
AdvantaSoyTMClearTM 30-50 mg/ 100 g serving
http://westonaprice.org/soy/da…..vones.html
—————————————————
Confused About Soy?–Soy Dangers Summarized
* High levels of phytic acid in soy reduce assimilation of calcium, magnesium, copper, iron and zinc. Phytic acid in soy is not neutralized by ordinary preparation methods such as soaking, sprouting and long, slow cooking. High phytate diets have caused growth problems in children.
* Trypsin inhibitors in soy interfere with protein digestion and may cause pancreatic disorders. In test animals soy containing trypsin inhibitors caused stunted growth.
* Soy phytoestrogens disrupt endocrine function and have the potential to cause infertility and to promote breast cancer in adult women.
* Soy phytoestrogens are potent antithyroid agents that cause hypothyroidism and may cause thyroid cancer. In infants, consumption of soy formula has been linked to autoimmune thyroid disease.
* Vitamin B12 analogs in soy are not absorbed and actually increase the body’s requirement for B12.
* Soy foods increase the body’s requirement for vitamin D.
* Fragile proteins are denatured during high temperature processing to make soy protein isolate and textured vegetable protein.
* Processing of soy protein results in the formation of toxic lysinoalanine and highly carcinogenic nitrosamines.
* Free glutamic acid or MSG, a potent neurotoxin, is formed during soy food processing and additional amounts are added to many soy foods.
* Soy foods contain high levels of aluminum which is toxic to the nervous system and the kidneys.
More on the Soy case. It is in all the Ensure products along with the ever present corn. Milk proteins doesn’t mean real milk. The products contain no lactose.
http://westonaprice.org/press/press-13jul09.html
Lawsuit
The Weston A. Price Foundation has hired an attorney to represent several inmates incarcerated in the Illinois Department of Corrections system. The lead case is captioned Harris et al. v. Brown, et al., Case No. 3:07-cv-03225, and is currently pending before the Honorable Harold Baker in the United States District Court for the Central District of Illinois. The suit seeks an injunction putting a halt to the use of a soy-laden diet in the prison system.
Relatives of inmates are urged to write to the U.S. Department of Justice and request that they initiate an investigation and enforcement action under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 United States Code Section 1997a, also known as the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA). A sample letter is given below.
Inmates suffering from the soy diet are urged to file grievance reports and to write respectful letters to Judge Harold Baker referring to Harris et al. v. Brown, et al., Case No. 3:07-cv-03225 describing the health problems caused by the soy diet and requesting a permanent injunction against the serving of soy foods in prison meals.
Honorable Harold Baker
United States District Court Judge for the Central District of Illinois
338 U.S. Courthouse
201 South Vine Street
Urbana, IL 61802
***************************
Sample Letter Sent by a Relative of an Inmate
[Date]
Honorable Eric Holder, Attorney General
U.S. Department of Justice
950 Pennsylvania Avenue
Washington, DC 20530
Copy to:
Patrick J. Fitzgerald, Special Counsel
U.S. Department of Justice
Northern District of Illinois
Federal Building
219 South Dearborn Street, 5th Floor
Chicago, Illinois 60604
Dear Sirs:
I am writing to request that you initiate an investigation and enforcement action under the Prison Litigation Reform Act, 42 United States Code Section 1997a, also known as the Civil Rights of Institutionalized Persons Act (CRIPA).
I have a relative, [first name, last name, identification number], who is presently incarcerated in [name of facility]. He has been incarcerated there since [date of incarceration]. He has become ill with the following symptoms since the Illinois Department of Corrections began feeding a soy-based diet in January 2003: [List symptoms].
He has not been able to get appropriate medical care from the prison staff and I am concerned about the long-term effects of this soy diet on his health. According to information posted in the FDA’s Poisonous Plant Database and from research published in medical journals over the past sixty years, soy has the potential to cause serious health problems, especially if consumed in large amounts. This diet may make it impossible for [name of inmate] to engage in necessary activities to earn his living after his release and may even cause him to have medical problems that will be very costly to the state of Illinois.
According to law, prisoners are entitled to “nutritionally adequate food” (Ramos v Lamm, 639.2d 559, 1980). According to Illinois law, “Infliction of unnecessary suffering on prisoner by failure to treat his medical needs is inconsistent with contemporary standards of decency and violates the Eighth Amendment” (Key Note 7. Criminal Law 1213).
The justification for the switch from beef to soy is to save money, but according to one court case, “A lack of financing is not a defense to a failure to satisfy minimum constitutional standards in prisons” (Duran v. Anaya, 642, Supp. 510 (DNM 1986), page 525, paragraph 6).
I urge you to look into this situation and take action to reinstate a nutritious diet for the inmates in Illinois prisons, before the soy diet irreparably destroys their health.
Sincerely yours,
[Name]
[Address]
[City, State, Zip]
Here’s the open letter to Obama – pdf
http://westonaprice.org/soy/obama-letter.pdf
There is abundant evidence that serious crimes, including murder, have been committed under our EIT program. These crimes must be solved, and the purpetrators brought to justice.
“If you look at the science on the site, you’ll see the strength of their arguments.”
Ugh. I’m a scientist who deals with people who have been misinformed by the crap that the Weston A. Price Foundation pumps out on a semi-regular basis. This obviously isn’t the place for a point-by-point rebuttal, but let me just say that, judged on their scientific merits, most of their claims are extremely weak, particularly as applied to processed meat analogues. Like many misinformation campaigns (c.f. creationists, global warming deniers, etc.) the Weston Price people throw out a slew of claims in the hopes that any one of them will stick. Most people aren’t willing or able to get down in the weeds and do the work to discover that these claims are for the most part bogus.
I’m a scientist who deals with people who have been misinformed by the crap that the Weston A. Price Foundation pumps out on a semi-regular basis…
judged on their scientific merits, most of their claims are extremely weak, particularly as applied to processed meat analogues
——————————————-
What type of science brings you into contact with people who have been reading Weston Price information?
My degree is in neurobiology, but I work primarily in food science/nutrition now.
Well judging by your name you seem like a grassfed meat kinda science person:)
Ironically, I mostly work with meatless products.
Again, why do the reports at the NYT always, consistently fail to read the federal laws and treaties to which the United States is signatory that proscribe torture and inhuman treatment? I’d call it willful ignorance at best and adherence to a totalitarian bent in the publishers of the New York Times in fact.