Blake Sifton

Though their actions invoke less dramatic imagery than the interrogators and prison guards who tortured and humiliated Muslim detainees at Guantanamo Bay and Abu Ghraib, equally guilty are the legions of professionals who facilitated the abuse.

Although the principal maxim of medical ethics is “First do no harm,” psychologists and doctors working for the military and CIA actively assisted in the torture of human beings. Psychologists helped fine-tune techniques such as sleep deprivation, stress positions and waterboarding, and doctors often monitored harsh interrogations, intervening when necessary to keep struggling prisoners alive and alert so the questioning could continue.

How could medical professionals demonstrate such little empathy in the presence of human suffering?

“People are capable of incredible cruelty. It’s increased in circumstances where there aren’t clear rules and boundaries,” says psychoanalyst Dr. Stephen Soldz. “We dehumanized the enemy after 9/11. We did it as a culture and the military did it spectacularly well. Like many others, military doctors felt a duty to serve their country.”

In 2007 Dr. Soldz urged the American Psychological Association to ban psychologists from participating in the interrogation of terror suspects.

“Professional ethics are always weak,” he says. “We have wonderful statements by professional associations about what the ethics are, but many people don’t internalize them.”

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Alex Deane
Big Brother Watch

Photography is NOT A CRIME. We are not terrorists.

Yet more abuse of photographers in a public place.

As I have written before about the police and demonstrations, and specifically about photography, one of the worst repercussions of the anti-terror legislation is the blanket powers officers wrongly think it gives them to hassle people when they fancy it. A minor named Jules Mattsson was taking photographs of a parade in Romford recently. The result is quite extraordinary.

Confronted by the police for doing precisely nothing wrong, this young man admirably stood up for himself and maintained, rightly, that he was entitled to take pictures in a public place. The police, as they have done so often in these cases, bullied and hectored him under imaginary "powers". Listen to the footage - their behaviour is quite astonishing.

An officer bluntly asserts that it is an offence to take pictures of children. Wrong. Then he is told by an officer called "John Fisher" that it is a "criminal offence" to take pictures of police officers and police staff. Entirely wrong. He is shouted at and bullied and told that he is being treated like this because he is an "agitator". He is told, nonsensically, that he is being moved on "for his own safety" because he would be trampled by the parade if he stayed where he was - despite the fact that it is clear from the recording that he is standing there solely because an officer has hold of him!

The journalist asks again and again the law under which he is being detained, held, questioned - a question to which an answer is of course a basic right when being detained, held, questioned by the police. He never gets one.

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Vittorio Arrigoni, Gaza City, Gaza July 4, 2010

Palestinian fisherman on the shore in Gaza City. A Lebanese ship
was stopped by the Israeli navy and is being escorted into port.

[Many thanks to the anonymous commenter who posted this in response to my plea for information on the current state of the Gaza Blockade. They didn't post a link, so it is reproduced here in full. As I suspected, there has been no real change in the Israeli strangulation of Gaza. -Craig Murray]

Ketchup, mayonnaise, thread and needles are the items that were included last week by Israel on the list of those few goods now allowed into Gaza. Farming tools, spare parts for cars, toys and make-up were added to the list on Tuesday, items we watched being carried into the Strip loaded onto 130 trucks.

Taking into account the decision of the Israeli government to "loosen" the siege of Gaza by allowing the entry of more goods, B'Tselem, the Israeli organisation for human rights commented: "This is a first, tiny step towards the right direction, the direction which'll bring Israeli policy in line with its obligations."

A veritable microscopic step, considering that before the start of the siege, more than ten thousand trucks a month would drive through the Karni pass alone, and even then, these deliveries were miles away from the 500 truckfuls of goods a day (15,000 trucks a month), the minimum decreed by the United Nations to cover the basic needs of one and a half million people.

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B'Tselem

July 2010, Comprehensive report: The cloak of legality that Israel has sought to give to the settlement enterprise is aimed at covering the ongoing theft of West Bank land, thereby removing the basic values of legality and justice from Israel’s system of law enforcement in the West Bank. The report exposes the system Israel has adopted as a tool to advance political objectives, enabling the systematic infringement of the Palestinians’ human rights.

Some half a million Israelis are now living over the Green Line: more than 300,000 in 121 settlements and about one hundred outposts, which control 42 percent of the land area of the West Bank, and the rest in twelve neighborhoods that Israel established on land it annexed to the Jerusalem Municipality. The report analyzes the means employed by Israel to gain control of land for building the settlements. In preparing the report, B'Tselem relied on official state data and documents, among them Attorney Talia Sasson’s report on the outposts, the database produced by Brigadier General Baruch Spiegel, reports of the state comptroller, and maps of the Civil Administration.

The settlement enterprise has been characterized, since its inception, by an instrumental, cynical, and even criminal approach to international law, local legislation, Israeli military orders, and Israeli law, which has enabled the continuous pilfering of land from Palestinians in the West Bank.

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