Ricardo Sanchez to make U.S. Senate run? Puhleeze

Color me skeptical, as in 2002 Texas gubernatorial run by Tony Sanchez skeptical, that Ricardo Sanchez can be a magnetic drawing card to bring massive amounts of Texas Hispanics to the polls for the Democratic Party.

Sanchez, best known for his Abu Ghraib baggage, says he's considering a run to replace Kay Bailey Hutchison. That's after heavy recruitment by top state Democrats.

First, per the second story, Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee Chairwoman Patty Murray is delusional if she thinks Sanchez, or about any Democrat, has a chance at that seat in 2012, unless one of the GOP primary losers runs an independent general-election campaign.

Second, per the Tony Sanchez parallel, what's Ricardo Sanchez's political positions? Is he, too, a closet Republican? And, have Ben Barnes et al "test driven" him with any sample marketing?

Third, fairly or not, there IS Abu Ghraib.

Obama promotes top Gitmo and Abu Ghraib psychologist

Larry James will now head a new White House task force on the well-being of the military family. Glenn Greenwald has all the details, including on how James appears to at least "let it slide" on torture at both sites, if not give a degree of active condoning, in psychological language. Greenwald's got links to protests against Wright and more.

Glenn doesn't really get into how psychiatrists, as a group, early on protested supporting military torture, torture-lite and and reverse-engineered SERE, while it took the main U.S. psychologists' group almost a decade to even come close to the same level of condemnation.

Greenwald adds that James hasn't been charged, let alone condemned, with any offense. Of course, a kick upstairs like this means he never will be. And, having read ames' self-serving book about his time at both Abu Ghraib and Gitmo, I have no doubt he's guilty of aiding and abetting torture.

That said, sadly, Greenwald still doesn't push third-party voting in posts like this, either.

You can do better, Glenn.

Abu Ghraib 2.0 pix ARE available

Read this Telegraph story to see one of them, likely one of the milder ones.

One picture showed a prisoner hung up upside down while another showed a naked man smeared in excrement standing in a corridor with a guard standing menacingly in front of him. Another prisoner is handcuffed to the window frame of his cell with underpants pulled over his head.

Others yet to be released reportedly show military guards threatening to sexually assault a detainee with a broomstick and hooded prisoners on transport planes with Playboy magazines opened to pictures of nude women on their laps.

So, note to our current Torture Enabler in Chief at 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. -- the cat's at least partway out of the bag already.

And, regular readers know the bottom-line answer: Vote Green. Stop enabling the duopoly, and stop enabling the torture enablers.

Show us the Abu Ghraib 2.0 pix – up pressure on Obama

The American Civil Liberties Union has won all the lawsuits to get both private and official military pictures of Abu Ghraib released to the public, but at least two Senators are resisting.

Mr. Former CIA Lindsey Graham and Joementum Lieberman are urging President Barack Obama to find some way to block the release of hundreds of pictures, claiming it could infuriate Muslim opinion.

Why?

“These photographs provide visual proof that prisoner abuse by U.S. personnel was not aberrational but widespread, reaching far beyond the walls of Abu Ghraib,” said Amrit Singh, an ACLU lawyer.

Releasing them would also increase pressure on Obama to change course on “looking forward” on torture, which means that, IMO, there’s good odds Obama will try to find a way to do just what Lieberman and Graham want.

Besides, American arrests of Muslim journalists, complete with no post-release apologies, has poisoned the well plenty.

Stanley Fish – why psychologists participated at Abu Ghraib

Stanley Fish has an thought-provoking column noting that many psychologists have a “hired gun” attitude, part of how he contrasts them with psychiatrists:

Psychology, on the other hand (vs. psychiatry), is not exclusively a healing profession. To be sure, there are psychologists who provide counseling, therapy and other services to patients; but there are many psychologists who think of themselves as behavioral scientists. ... Are psychologists experts for hire, or is it understood, as a matter of professional self-definition, that their expertise is to be deployed only for benign purposes?

As a matter of fact, psychological skills are purchased and deployed as commodities all the time. ... Large corporations employ psychological profilers to help make them make personnel decisions. Sports teams hire “coaches” whose job it is to motivate players and make them more aggressive. Hospitals use the results of psychological examinations to decide whether or not a patient should be released. And of course the military employs psychologists in an effort to identify techniques that lead prisoners to spill what they know.

Thought that was interesting? THIS is the nut graf:

In fact, the moment psychological knowledge of causes and effects is put into strategic action is the moment when psychology ceases to be a science and becomes an extension of someone’s agenda. Employing psychological skills in the course of any verbal interaction – be it a domestic conversation, classroom teaching, a performance in a law court, or an interrogation – will always have the effect of subordinating the facts and the truth of the matter to the desire for an outcome.

And, that’s exactly what happened at Gitmo and Abu Ghraib.

But, psychiatrists could have done the same things.

But, per some of the commentors to his column-length blog post, I think he has a point about the “persuasive professions” in general without drawing a largely artificial distinction between psychology and psychiatry. After all, psychiatrists have, in the past, used drugs in the service of the CIA and other organizations.

And, the whole premise of “Brave New World” was based on chemicals, not talk.

In fact, it wasn’t psychologists shooting up people at Gitmo, Abu Ghraib, or Bagram, with pentothal or other drugs, now, was it.

Rather, it probably was a difference in politics between the American Psychiatric Association and the American Psychological Association that led psychiatrists to proscribe participating in interrogations more than two years ago.

Then, Fish goes Socratic on us.

As a linguist and philosopher, Fish then ties this to the ancient Greek skill of rhetoric. Shades of the Protagoras! He argues that psychology, like rhetoric, risks being a content-free tool.

I’m just scratching the surface of an stimulating, if flawed, column; read it all for yourself.

U.S. mercenary contractors sued over Abu Ghraib

Four Iraqis held prisoner at Saddam Hussein’s former torture center are suing top American mercenary contractors involved with their imprisonment.

The suit also alleges destruction of evidence, hiding prisoners from the International Red Cross and other no-nos.

Abu Ghraib de facto U.S. policy in Iraq

And the iconic prisoner stood on a chair and connected to dummy electrodes, the man that troops called “Gilligan”? Nothing but a Baghdad cab driver.

That’s what the New Yorker says — with photos — with photos far beyond the original, in multiple slide shows.

The New Yorker story, not yet online but profiled here by Raw Story, is about the woman who took many of those photos, Sabrina Harman. From an interview accompanying one of the slide shows:

ERROL MORRIS: Why did you have this urge right from the beginning? Because it was so weird, or...?

SABRINA HARMAN: I don’t know, it’s just—It’s kind of hard to believe if I come up to you and I’m like, “Hey, this is going on,” you probably wouldn’t believe me unless I had something to show you. So if I say, “Hey, this is going on. Look, I have proof,” you can’t deny it, I guess.

Per Raw Story Morris and Philip Gourevich show how Harman’s perception evolved:

“ricocheting from childish mockery to casual swagger to sympathy to cruelty to titillation to self-justification to self-doubt to outrage to identification to despair” — through interviews and excerpts she sent home from the prison. In one October 2003 letter to Kelly, the woman Harman called her wife, the young MP writes what could now be seen as a grim foreshadow to the war in which American soldiers are still fighting and dying.

“These people will be our future terrorist,” she writes one night after witnessing interrogators poking one detainees genitals with a stick and handcuffing another to his top bunk. "Kelly, its (sic) awful and you know how fucked I am in the head. Both sides of me think its (sic) wrong. I thought I could handle anything. I was wrong.”

Harman herself is neither innocent nor unscathed. Another iconic photo from the first lot of pictures to come out of Abu Ghraib shows a female soldier standing over the body of a dead Iraqi and giving the “thumbs up” sign. That soldier is Samantha Harman.

And, either back then, or still today, she “believed” in what she was helping do.

An undated quote in the Raw Story article has her saying, “They’re more patriotic,” as to how some people could commit such abuses without it bothering them.