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Tag Archives: policy

Also in Media: Speckhard on Torture

25 Sunday Feb 2018

Posted by commart in 21st Century Feudal, Also in Media, American Domestic Affairs, Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, Political Psychology, Political Spychology, Psychology

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absolute power, Anne Speckhard, malignant narcissism, medieval v modern, policy, torture, violence and impunity

Just as the authors identify the factors that are predictive of those individuals and situations that are most likely to give rise to torture, they also identify the psychosocial sequelae of engaging in torture. These include dissociative personality splinters, social isolation, avoidance of reminders, self-condemnation with guilt and shame, intrusive thoughts and flashbacks, nightmares and sleep disturbances, high arousal states with the inability to concentrate or sleep well, and drug and alcohol abuse to forget and painful emotional states upon remembering. Lastly, the authors identify the practices that can be put in place to protect individuals from crossing the line into perpetrating abuse, atrocities, and torture upon those placed in their custody. Torture, as noted by Article 1 of the United Nations Convention against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman or Degrading Treatments (United Nations, 1984; 1987):

Any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

Speckhard, Anne and Charles Figley and Ardian Shajkovci.  “Psychosocial Drivers, Prevention and Sequelae of Engaging in Torture.”  International Center for the Study of Violent Extremism, April 17, 2017.


. . . the thoughtful individual needs to examine some core questions—the first being—does torture in any of it’s forms, including “torture lite” work? The answer appears to be a resounding no. Torture for the most part fails as a tactic because it does not leads to credible information, is problematic later for anyone we wish to prosecute, and may actually contribute far more to terrorism recruitment rather than to curbing terrorism. When dealing with al Qaeda for instance we must understand that most hardened terrorists who have blood on their hands have committed themselves to the idea of “martyrdom” and may be adept at misleading us when we believe they have cracked under torture. And when we resort to anything that is morally bankrupt they will later use it against us to show their constituents and potential recruits our “true colors”.

By contrast, interrogation that relies on rapport building has shown itself to yield positive results . . . .

Speckhard, Anne.  “Zero Dark Thirty — And the Real World of Torture, Enhanced Interrogation, Rendition and Prolonged Detention.”  Anne Speckhard, Ph.D, March 4, 2013.


Among other topics expertly engaged, Dr. Anne Speckhard has been working the issues on the subject of torture for many years.

If the repercussions are so bad and the results so thin, why do we persist with the same in practice?

BackChannels may suggest that engagement in torture represents the power of ownership of another experienced by the malign narcissist and is in the end, always, an expression of unbridled absolute power, i.e., the power to inflict suffering on others with impunity.

In his classic Russia Under the Old Regime, scholar Richard Pipes remarks on the meaning of sovereignty in the recession of Mongol power and subsequent princely Russian attitude toward property and persons as being alike — the power to destroy either the demonstration of sovereign ownership (approximate pages 70-80).

Note: between age, interests, and sedentary lifestyle at the desktop, your BackChannels editor is tiring and has two choice regarding loose scholarship: read less and slowly with pen, foolscap, and note cards at hand; continue remembering generally; or move off to a different kind of writing.  As regards Pipes, he’s masterful with analysis, complexity, and detail, and he will take the reader into the locking mechanisms between political exigency, political evolution in language, and the projection of political power.

For the purposes of this blog, the editor believe Moscow has deeply narcissistic issues supporting “absolute power” and all of the horror rightly associated with the demonstration of the complete absence of conscience in relation to the suffering of others.

On a more near historic note, author Anna Funder relays the testimony of a former Stasi prisoner arrested first for seditious leafleting and then again — having been motivated by the former imprisonment — for having attempted a crossing into then West Germany.  The form of torture during the second stay was sleep deprivation.  Here’s how that went down:

On the eleventh night, Miriam gave them what they wanted.  ‘I thought, “You people want an underground escape organisation?”  Well, I’ll give you one then.”

Fleischer had won.

‘There,’ he said, ‘that wasn’t so bad now, was it?  Why didn’t you tell us earlier and save yourself all this trouble?’  They let her sleep for a fortnight, and gave her one book each week.  She read it in a day, then started memorising the pages, walking up and down in the cell with the book to her chest.

‘In retrospect it’s funny,’ Miriam says, ‘but at the time it was pure, unalloyed frustration.  I cooked them up a story I would not have believed myself, even then.  It was utterly absurd.”

‘Miriam’ was on the far side of sixteen at the time she “cooked them up a story” in exchange for a little sleep.

Additional Reference

Funder, Anna.  Stasiland: Stories From Behind the Berlin Wall.  U.S. Edition, paperback.  New York: HarperCollins, 2002.

Pipes, Richard. Russia Under the Old Regime: The History of Civilization. New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1974.

Additional Reading Online

Bukovsky, Vladimir.  “Torture’s Long Shadow.”  The Washington Post, December 18, 2005:

One nasty morning Comrade Stalin discovered that his favorite pipe was missing. Naturally, he called in his henchman, Lavrenti Beria, and instructed him to find the pipe. A few hours later, Stalin found it in his desk and called off the search. “But, Comrade Stalin,” stammered Beria, “five suspects have already confessed to stealing it.”

This joke, whispered among those who trusted each other when I was a kid in Moscow in the 1950s, is perhaps the best contribution I can make to the current argument in Washington about legislation banning torture and inhumane treatment of suspected terrorists captured abroad. Now that President Bush has made a public show of endorsing Sen. John McCain’s amendment, it would seem that the debate is ending. But that the debate occurred at all, and that prominent figures are willing to entertain the idea, is perplexing and alarming to me. I have seen what happens to a society that becomes enamored of such methods in its quest for greater security; it takes more than words and political compromise to beat back the impulse.


Fair for Look-Up

“Abu Ghraib”

“Evin Prison”

“Saydnaya Prison”

Through torture, it would seem the torturer learns most of all about himself, if he learns anything, and when it’s over, he may be treated to the sight of himself in media as ever deranged, infantile, sadistic, and tyrannical.

–33–

 

 

Updated: Iran’s Chemical Weapons Double-Bind

08 Sunday Sep 2013

Posted by commart in Uncategorized

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Tags

chemical weapons, conflict, CW, defense, delivery, German, manufacture, middle east, military, policy, political, politics, state, U.S.

https://conflict-backchannels.com/2013/09/06/irans-chemical-weapons-double-bind-and-the-effects-of-american-poor-judgment/

Scroll down if you go there:

German manufacturing of lethal chemicals  –> via U.S. subsidiaries –> middle east countries with Reagan and Bush era Department of Defense aid and consent.

###

Iran in Syria – Testimony Addresses Human Rights Violations

31 Friday May 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology

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Tags

Canada, foreign affairs, human rights, Iran, policy, politics, Syria, United States

Iran has also helped the Assad regime crack down on social media. In February 2011, Syria allowed access to social media websites such as Facebook and YouTube for the first time since 2007. At the time, some viewed this as a positive attempt at reform in order to allow freedom of expression. By May there was a 105 percent increase in the number of Facebook users in Syria, but it also became clear that the regime was using social media to track dissidents.16 US officials reported that in
addition to providing weapons, riot gear, and training, Iran was also supplying sophisticated surveillance equipment to the Syrian government. The Syrian regime used it to track down leaders of the protest movements and arrest them.

Levitt, Matthew.  “Iranian Support for Terrorism and Violations of Human Rights.”  Testimony before the Standing Committee on Foreign Affairs and International Development, International Human Rights Subcommittee, House of Commons, Parliament of Canada.  PDF.  The Washington Institute for Near East Policy, May 30, 2013.

What one may see on the web of Syria’s civil war may belie what either the Assad regime or the collection of rebel forces, group by group, have kept hidden even though the standards for propriety as regards online publishing could not be lower.

While Matthew Levitt’s report reaches back to the 2003 arrest in Iran and subsequent torture of journalist Zahra Kazem to provide its most graphic description of the kind of pain meted out by way of the regime’s paranoid fantasia, it may leave to YouTube and the future to describe what horrors behind the curtains became the lot of captured Syrian dissidents in recent times.

Of perhaps equal interest in the report may be a part of the primary source material cited in the footnotes, for example, “Executive Order 13572 of April 29, 2011: Blocking Property of Certain Persons with Respect to Human Rights Abuses in Syria“:

“I, BARACK OBAMA, President of the United States of America, hereby expand the scope of the national emergency declared in Executive Order 13338 of May 11, 2004, and relied upon for additional steps taken in Executive Order 13399 of April 25, 2006, and in Executive Order 13460 of February 13, 2008, finding that the Government of Syria’s human rights abuses, including those related to the repression of the people of Syria, manifested most recently by the use of violence and torture against, and arbitrary arrests and detentions of, peaceful protesters by police, security forces, and other entities that have engaged in human rights abuses, constitute an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security, foreign policy, and economy of the United States, and I hereby order . . . .”

The “Government of Syria” described in executive orders between 2004 and 2011 is the same as that supported by Russia’s President Vladimir Putin.

It would appear the ghosts of the Cold War continue to haunt the politics in the Middle East.

Additional Reference

International Campaign for Human Rights in Iran.  “As Elections Approach, Iran Remains Silent on Arrests of Journalists.”  May 30, 2013.

Levitt, Matthew.  “Congressional Testimony: Iranian Support for Terrorism and Violations of Human Rights.”  PDF download page.  The Washington Institute, May 30, 2013.

Rights & Democracy for Iran.  “Iranian Journalist’s Own Experiences and His Interviews with 19 Political Prisoners.”  June 3, 2011.

Wikipedia.  “Chain Murders of Iran”.

Wikipedia.  “Evin Prison”.

Wikipedia.  “White torture”.

Wikipedia.  “Zahra Kazemi”.

FTAC – The Least War Possible – From Correspondence

24 Friday May 2013

Posted by commart in Conflict - Culture - Language - Psychology, FTAC - From The Awesome Conversation, Islamic Small Wars, Politics

≈ Leave a comment

Tags

extremism, Islam, policy, war

Nearly verbatim.

—–

Hi, A.,

Even war has a grammar.

Obama’s underlying rule may be “least war possible”, and with a long war involving a modern state with both its amenities and technologies and contracting methods riding right along with the Navy, such guidance would have practical as well as political ramifications. As America’s 21st Century Roman arrogance declined precipitously with the Vietnam War, and it may be suggested at least that adventure into every subsequent engagement has been beneath its shadow.
In essence, from financial, strategic, and tactical perspectives, the United States may be fighting the war it can.

(I’m going to hit “enter” here but continue thoughts the “least war possible”).

With nuclear weapons in the wings and an enemy loaded with self-serving grandiose presumptions of a civilizational nature, working around “the least war possible”, travels sideways to the belligerent’s want of a “clash of civilizations”: Russia may not be so subtle about facing challenges from Islam (as illustrated in Chechnya), but NATO would seem to be working hard to preserve Islam, to validate Muslim identity, but also to allow or actually enable it to evolve.

This, of course, is where the west mires itself in strident anti-Jihad, apologist, Islamic defense, and reformist arguments.

In my blog, I use 9:29 as signal to the kind of passage the surrounding world will not tolerate and signal to the behavior, the intolerance, that the greater Muslim society, the Ummah, itself cannot tolerate having been twisted into the first target of the intolerant and venal.

So “the least war possible” may not only extend military and related political and social capital (post-Vietnam), it also buys time to let nature — our lovely gregarious human nature — weather away the sharp edges of Muhammad’s expression culminating both in a greater monotheist allegiance but also his own singular glorification.

(More to come).

For “realpolitik”, the Arab center of the Islamic universe gets a “follow-on” by way of “the least war possible”.

Instead of the discomfort and tragedy of an incalculable nature considering the cross-cultural integument built on the backbone of the energy trade and related reinvestment, “the English”, also everyone else, and “the Arab” come out of this with many good things near term — this references the Shiite vs. Sunni variable in displacing the Iranian Ayatollah’s power, defending Israel (and the west), and preserving for greater development an informed global experience that has become the open society experience by way of immense investments in education and research across an entire universe of interests, much including philology and religion (in which regard, I’m a pretty good starving example of an average, maybe a little bit better, not-yet-successful western artist and intellectual: I have the formal empirical and literary experiences through graduate work, and some 30 years later a 2,000-volume in-apartment library . . . and a home on the web (no contracts, no paychecks — a shame, for sure, if it weren’t for the intellectual freedom experienced).

Forgive me the digression.

The “least war possible” would seem to advance Sunni Islam by way of the leverage available from the Saudi sphere of influence.

As the Saudis must see themselves in mirrored in the World Wide Web AND as the west urges reforms AND as internal pressures develop (God has praised the daughters of generals), “the least war possible” also obtains time for a slow rate of inevitable transformation. This the Jihad vs. anti-Jihad forces may not understand, and so here on Facebook they are at each other’s throats in “Islamists vs. Zionists” (open group), but even that is part of bringing a closed kettle — yes, a pressure cooker — to a simmer, such that everyone in it stews a bit but nothing explodes in the way that it could.

(more to come).

For either Afghanistan and Pakistan — or all involved in the South Asian sphere of “Islamist” operations — “the least war possible” may be experienced as a brutal drag.

Perhaps a hardened old salt would call it “a learning experience”, which it may be — it takes time to filter and train up an anti-Jihadist military and police from within the bastions of Islam, even if the same understand both their own self-preserving interests in the matter as well as the necessity of developing a greater environment — “improved qualities in living” may be a term I’ll use — for themselves and their generations.

Still, compared to peace (now), the process plainly sucks.

Here I will add one more thing but from my web-based education and inspiration this year: the problems of the Islamic Small Wars and those posed by every conflict, development, and employment challenge have a “geo-spatial” aspect to them: even the best and most ethical of educators, engineers, planners, and policy makers cannot address every problem everywhere all at once!

What I have heard from friends in South America and seen in Pakistan is that “writ of state” blurs wherever police and troops cannot be delivered to a firefight inside of something like 30 minutes.

(more to come; I’m on a roll)

In the imagination, the United States and NATO maintain awesome martial ability and firepower, and Islamic state partners in the “War on Terror” have ample potential themselves as regards material and troop assets; however, “the enemy” has not been for a long time a a large conventional force emerging at the edge of to-be-contested territory as  infantry and tank columns. As with the FARC in Colombia or the dueling cartel in Mexico, th

(I goofed!)!

” . . . emerging in tank columns” . . . . The Assad “battle plan”, or lack thereof, in Syria provides a fair example of what happens when a state applies the conventional hammer to a host of clever fleas, and so the regime has destroyed city blocks, many neighborhoods, practically the life of entire cities, and apart from expressing its pique by way of such destruction, it hasn’t contained or neutralized its rebel opposition.

From an observation standpoint, just looking at satellite photos of the destruction, Assad’s Syria, by way of conventional military force, has been eating itself alive.

Now I’ll return to the “geo-spatial” variable as regards Pakistan’s military and police and Afghanistan and NATO forces in the region: to secure any location by way of “the least war possible” (!) involves growing human assets in each to take care of themselves, this as opposed to building an enormous structure of airstrips, forts, and roads capable of fully policing (also, alas, perhaps abusing) constituents out to the edge of the “writ of the state”.

Lo and behold: in its human and political aspect, our lovely blue marble of a planet sustains ample dark and unsettled spaces, also known as “frontier”.

In regard to “dark space” and “frontier”, the geo-spatial aspect involved in combing out Taliban readying plans from remote locations or close-by but overlooked urban backrooms, basements, and garages — anonymity is a dark space — for mayhem and murder to be visited on others help make “the least war possible” the only war approachable.

(more, but I’m running out of energy)

There may be many political answers in regard to the persistance of Al Qaeda, the Taliban, and other similarly motivated organizations around the world, but the pursuit of the “least war possible” may acccount for balancing military and political capital with needs over time, for encouraging political and spiritual evolution across a broad human canvass in space and time, and for meeting spatial challenges involved in grooming what most hope will be a better world.

Life is life, should be enjoyed, made better for the living.

Death and sacrificial cults exists here and there on our planet, but in the Taliban (of interest here) and potential in Islam there seems an unpalatable want of heaven (now) for which death is presented as a desirable gateway.

Even if we ourselves should turn out “Islamists” and agree on this, I’d gamble on one or the other saying, “You first” — and in actuality, that is what happens: the seduced must allow their leaders to go on with the “burden” of surviving.

It’s a bad deal.

I don’t believe all of the “B’nai Israel” along the Durand Line have bought it or mean to keep it, but the God Mob has developed means and ways, and whether such manners persist in southern Sicily (for money and fearful respect) or up in the ranges approaching the roof the earth (for money and fearful respect cloaked in religion), they’re tough in their redoubts and making war is primarily what they make.

—–

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Caution: The possession of anti-Semitic / anti-Zionist thought may be the measure of the owner's own enslavement to criminal and medieval absolute power.
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Epigram

Hillel the Elder

"That which is distasteful to thee do not do to another. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now go and study."

"If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am not for others, what am I? If not now, when?"

"Whosoever destroys a soul, it is considered as if he destroyed an entire world. And whosoever that saves a life, it is considered as if he saved an entire world."

Oriana Fallaci
"Whether it comes from a despotic sovereign or an elected president, from a murderous general or a beloved leader, I see power as an inhuman and hateful phenomenon...I have always looked on disobedience toward the oppressive as the only way to use the miracle of having been born."

Talmud 7:16 as Quoted by Rishon Rishon in 2004
Qohelet Raba, 7:16

אכזרי סוף שנעשה אכזרי במקום רחמן

Kol mi shena`asa rahaman bimqom akhzari Sof shena`asa akhzari bimqom rahaman

All who are made to be compassionate in the place of the cruel In the end are made to be cruel in the place of the compassionate.

More colloquially translated: "Those who are kind to the cruel, in the end will be cruel to the kind."

Online Source: http://www.rishon-rishon.com/archives/044412.php

Abraham Isaac Kook

"The purely righteous do not complain about evil, rather they add justice.They do not complain about heresy, rather they add faith.They do not complain about ignorance, rather they add wisdom." From the pages of Arpilei Tohar.

Heinrich Heine
"Where books are burned, in the end people will be burned." -- From Almansor: A Tragedy (1823).

Simon Wiesenthal
Remark Made in the Ballroom of the Imperial Hotel, Vienna, Austria on the occasion of His 90th Birthday: "The Nazis are no more, but we are still here, singing and dancing."

Maimonides
"Truth does not become more true if the whole world were to accept it; nor does it become less true if the whole world were to reject it."

"The risk of a wrong decision is preferable to the terror of indecision."

Douglas Adams
"Isn't it enough to see that a garden is beautiful without having to believe that there are fairies at the bottom of it too?" Epigram appearing in the dedication of Richard Dawkins' The GOD Delusion.

Thucydides
"The Nation that makes a great distinction between its scholars and its warriors will have its thinking done by cowards and its fighting done by fools."

Milan Kundera
"The struggle of man against power is the struggle of memory against forgetting."

Malala Yousafzai
“The terrorists thought that they would change our aims and stop our ambitions but nothing changed in my life except this: weakness, fear and hopelessness died. Strength, power and courage was born.”

Tanit Nima Tinat
"Who could die of love?"

What I Have Said About the Jews

My people, not that I speak for them, I nonetheless describe as a "global ethnic commune with its heart in Jerusalem and soul in the Land of Israel."

We have never given up on God, nor have we ever given up on one another.

Many things we have given up, but no one misses, say, animal sacrifice, and as many things we have kept, so we have still to welcome our Sabbath on Friday at sunset and to rest all of Saturday until three stars appear in the sky.

Most of all, through 5,773 years, wherever life has taken us, through the greatest triumphs and the most awful tragedies, we have preserved our tribal identity and soul, and so shall we continue eternally.

Anti-Semitism / Anti-Zionism = Signal of Fascism

I may suggest that anti-Zionism / anti-Semitism are signal (a little bit) of fascist urges, and the Left -- I'm an old liberal: I know my heart -- has been vulnerable to manipulation by what appears to me as a "Red Brown Green Alliance" driven by a handful of powerful autocrats intent on sustaining a medieval worldview in service to their own glorification. (And there I will stop).
One hopes for knowledge to allay fear; one hopes for love to overmatch hate.

Too often, the security found in the parroting of a loyal lie outweighs the integrity to be earned in confronting and voicing an uncomfortable truth.

Those who make their followers believe absurdities may also make them commit atrocities.

Positively Orwellian: Comment Responding to Claim that the Arab Assault on Israel in 1948 Had Not Intended Annihilation

“Revisionism” is the most contemptible path that power takes to abet theft and hide shame by attempting to alter public perception of past events.

On Press Freedom, Commentary, and Journalism

In the free world, talent -- editors, graphic artists, researchers, writers -- gravitate toward the organizations that suit their interests and values. The result: high integrity and highly reliable reportage and both responsible and thoughtful reasoning.

This is not to suggest that partisan presses don't exist or that propaganda doesn't exist in the west, but any reader possessed of critical thinking ability and genuine independence -- not bought, not programmed -- is certainly free to evaluate the works of earnest reporters and scholars.

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