"Battlemind"

From a Washington Post article about a recent shooting spree at a US Military mental health clinic in Baghdad, where a soldier killed 5 of his comrades.

In an effort to prevent the mental strains, the Army is conducting resilience training known as "Battlemind" throughout its ranks and during different phases of deployment. "Battlemind" is an unprecedented effort to toughen soldiers psychologically for war, said Richard Keller, who leads the program at the Walter Reed Army Institute of Research in Silver Spring.

"We show them what the deployment experience can be like, what things you might see, smell, think, feel, hear -- all the sensory inputs . . . so they are not taken by surprise," Keller said.

"Some people have a tendency when an event takes place to catastrophize it, and make it appear more intense or difficult than it actually is," he said, so the training seeks to reinforce constructive reactions to combat and life-threatening situations.

While I've nothing but sympathy for people who suffer from warzone-related mental illnesses, there is something about this that strikes me as problematic. How exactly will these soldiers be mentally conditioned? What happens when you tell people to treat combat as a normal situation?

"So, you've just blown a door open before searching a house, and noticed on your way out that there's a child with an open head wound bleeding onto the floor. This is a normal combat-related accident, and when it happens, you'll be tempted to catastrophize it in your own mind. . . "

A clever politician, but an idiot in all other respects

Harvard Professor Michael Ignatieff has enjoyed a meteoric rise to the helm of the Liberal party, where he now sits sniping at the Konservatives, themselves led by a man Who Hates Canada (TM). For Ignatieff, this has been more than dumb blind luck, but is thanks to Ignatieff's considerable talents as a huckster.

Harvard is, of course, the home of a great many hucksters - the place attracts them like honey does flies - take, for example, the odious Alan "ILikeTortureandIsraelandEspeciallyIsraeliTorture" Dershowitz. Ignatieff himself published a fabulous tome "The Lesser Evil," in which he discusses his moral angst at the terrible things that must be done by "liberal democracies" in order to defeat the (primarily Muslim) hordes that exist in that fantastic new world of States-With-WMDs-Partnered-With-Non-State-Actors.

As Ignatieff wrote in an essay for Prospect Magazine in 2006:

Human rights activists accept that reliable information is essential for combating terrorists and that interrogation is a central feature of any counterterrorist strategy. Kenneth Roth, of Human Rights Watch, argues that "respect for the Geneva conventions does not preclude vigorously interrogating detainees about a limitless range of topics." What work is the word "vigorously" doing in this sentence? It is intended to make it clear that a human rights defender takes seriously the necessity of getting from detainees real information that may prevent future terrorist attacks. But what, in specific terms, might "vigorous" interrogation actually entail? Clearly, Roth and anyone else who cares about human rights wants to exclude any form of abuse. But what exactly counts as abuse in a "vigorous" interrogation?

Oh, oh, oh, ask me, ask me! "Vigourous" interrogation includes things like using deceptions, shouting, threatening future consequences for non-cooperation, holding the detainee without charge for 24-48 hours, bright lights, etc, etc.

It does not include waterboarding, lashings, fingernail detachments, or electrocution.

But please, continue:

Clear thinking about torture is not served by collapsing the distinction between coercive interrogation and torture. Both may be repugnant, but repugnance does not make them into the same thing. If coercion and torture are on a moral continuum, at what point on the continuum, to use Posner's words, does queasiness turn to revulsion? Vigorous interrogation might mean lengthy, exhausting, harassing exchanges with interrogators. Provided that there was no physical contact between interrogator and subject, no deprivation of food or water harmful to health, this might qualify as lawful interrogation. But at every ratchet of coercion, moral problems arise. Sleep deprivation will not leave physical or permanent psychological scars, but as Menachem Begin, who was interrogated in Soviet Russia, remembered, "anyone who has experienced this desire [for sleep] knows that not even hunger or thirst are comparable with it."

Oh yeah, I forgot - sleep deprivation. Don't do that either.

So I end up supporting an absolute and unconditional ban on both torture and those forms of coercive interrogation that involve stress and duress, and I believe that enforcement of such a ban should be up to the military justice system plus the federal courts. I also believe that the training of interrogators can be improved by executive order and that the training must rigorously exclude stress and duress methods.

Good. Thanks for your opinion. Bye.

What? You mean that wasn't it?

While some abuse and outright torture can be attributed to individual sadism, poor supervision and so on, it must be the case that other acts of torture occur because interrogators believe, in good faith, that torture is the only way to extract information in a timely fashion. It must also be the case that if experienced interrogators come to this conclusion, they do so on the basis of experience. The argument that torture and coercion do not work is contradicted by the dire frequency with which both practices occur. I submit that we would not be "waterboarding" Khalid Sheikh Mohammed—immersing him in water until he experiences the torment of nearly drowning—if our intelligence operatives did not believe it was necessary to crack open the al Qaeda network that he commanded. Indeed, Mark Bowden points to a Time report in March 2003 that Sheikh Mohammed had "given US interrogators the names and descriptions of about a dozen key al Qaeda operatives believed to be plotting terrorist attacks." We must at least entertain the possibility that the operatives working on Sheikh Mohammed in our name are engaging not in gratuitous sadism but in the genuine belief that this form of torture—and it does qualify as such—makes all the difference.

Indeed, and how did those new "leads" work out?

Guantanamo prisoner Binyam Mohamed awaits return to Britain
The Observer 2009/02/01
...
He claims that he had admitted under torture to plotting a radioactive bomb attack on the US. "They cut all over my private parts. One of them said it would be better just to cut it off, as I would only breed terrorists," he wrote in his diary.
...
He was charged with conspiracy to murder and attack civilians. US authorities claim that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, the alleged 9/11 mastermind, instructed the British resident to blow up flats in America. The charges were dropped after the torture claims surfaced.
...

Was anyone that Khalid Sheikh Mohammed fingered actually an Al-Qaeda agent? Maybe, but maybe not. Ultimately, the information did less good than harm, even if, in the short-term, the interrogators actually believed that it was useful. Anyone who the interrogators would have been able to ask Mohammed about would have already been in US custody - otherwise, he could have just made the names up.

The fallacy of all of Ignatieff's navel-gazing, armpit-sniffing pomposity is that none of it is borne out by evidence. To date, not a single "ticking time-bomb" case has been successfully solved with the aid of torture. Most famously, the London 7/7 bombings (the closest thing to a "ticking time-bomb" scenario that didn't happen on 24) were not solved by torture, but by standard police interrogation, much of which might have been "vigourous interrogation," but none of which approached torture.

This isn't the only issue on which Ignatieff has been shown to be wrong. Ignatieff was also a supporter of the invasion of Iraq, a position which he defends with the classic line of "Really? No WMDs? Darn. I could have sworn I saw some WMDs there. Check again. No? Wow, Saddam Hussein really was a tricky bastard, eh, pretending to have no WMDs while pretending that he had lots of WMDs. What a card!"

How did Ignatieff make it into Harvard? Simple: he does what most people who teach law or politics at Harvard do: he tells everyone what they most want to hear.

Now he's taken his act to Canada.

Shorter CanWest Global x 3

Today, The Proud Islamist is reading Canada's 3rd-rate journalism so you don't have to.

I give you the latest from Canada's print and television empire, noted purveyors of the American magazine that has become the traditional bastion of Republican wingnuttery.

Shorter David Warren:

Article: Rebuilding

The Judeo-Christian tradition is the only one in the world that believes that people are responsible for their choices. Hopefully, Barack Obama will realize this, and stop trying to help poor people escape what they deserve.

Shorter George Jonas:

Article: The war before the war

George Bush Sr.'s participation in the 1990 war with Iraq was an act of noble self-sacrifice. George Bush Jr's war in 2003 was a reasonable act of self-defense; Saddam shouldn't have spent so much time convincing everyone that he was a threat.

Shorter Baron Conrad Black of Crossharbour:

Article: Obama's victory marked by a wealth of opportunity

Having a lot of time on my hands these days, I've been thinking: even though Obama is a dangerous Marxist, he could institute some important reforms in the US financial sector and labour market. He could also get Iraqis to pay us for all the good we are about to do for them.

His Lordship looks best in stripes

O God, grant me the ability to distinguish stupidity from malice.

Shorter Robert Sibley

Article: Recalling another 9/11 Attack

George Bush's glorious "Coalition of the Willing" in Iraq is just like the European army that triumphed over the Ottoman hordes at Vienna in 1683, which is really the main reason why Muslims are angry at the West today.

PSCs and NGOs

Here is an account of a forum held between humanitarian NGOs and Private Security Contractors, on the deepening relationships between the two, posted on the blog of the Lancet Student.

The author of the post had some interesting comments of his own:

". . .

The Blackwater incident in Nisoor Square is no isolated example. Anecdotal reports of the atrocities carried out by PSC employees and their fatal mistakes abound, to which I’ll add my own. In my last operational tour with the British Army in Iraq the first person killed was not at the hands of a British soldier or his enemy but was shot by a PSC operative spooked by a small group of unarmed protesters at the gates of the Coalition Provisional Authority. PSC employees have infamously posted footage of their wayward actions, firing on the move into civilian vehicles, on the internet.

From Tuesday’s discussion it was clear that not only are PSCs taking a role in providing security for humanitarian organisations they are also being paid to provide the aid work themselves. To take matters further they are also passing themselves off as charities to raise money for projects as a force protection measure for their own operations. Whilst those present on the occasion did not take issue with this I find it significantly disturbing.

When the ‘humanitarian’ money for services required goes out to tender, the PSCs will have a strong case to put. They will be able to deliver a service swiftly and efficiently in areas where NGOs cannot or will not operate and it is worth noting that these areas, including Iraq and Afghanistan are the areas where big international donors, the US, the UK and the EU desperately want the services delivered. What is more, they will do those without insisting on difficult clauses concerning their neutrality or impartiality. The Private Security Company is a smart re-branding of an age-old concept - they are mercenaries. They will deliver a service and they will kill people in doing so. . . "