How the American Psychological Association Supported and Provided Cover for the C.I.A. Torture Program

Those who preach a “New Order” which is no more than a projection of the tendencies of the last forty years, and who can think of nothing better than to imitate Hitler.  It is, indeed, those who cry loudest for the New Order who are most completely under the sway of the ideas which have created this war and most of the evils from which we suffer.

– F.A. Hayek in The Road to Serfdom

In a story that sounds like it could’ve come straight from the archives of Nazi Germany, a new report has just been released claiming that the American Psychological Association (APA) collaborated with the George W. Bush administration to justify the C.I.A. torture program.

It’s even worse than it sounds though. In 2004, following the publication of the grotesque photos depicting abuse of Iraqi prisoners at the infamous Abu Ghraib prison, the U.S. government’s torture program was coming under increased scrutiny and criticism from all sides. In fact, it became so questionable, even C.I.A. director George Tenet began to have concerns. So much so that he “signed a secret order suspending the agency’s use of the enhanced techniques, while asking for a policy review to make sure the program still had the Bush administration’s backing.”

This is where the American Psychological Association came to the aid of torture supporters everywhere. A private meeting was quickly held, which ended up justifying the role of psychologists in torture sessions. The following year, the APA issued guidelines that reaffirmed that it was acceptable for its members to be involved in the interrogation program.

But don’t take my word for it. The New York Times reports:

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The 2014 Elections by the Numbers – Who are the 1% of 1% Driving American Politics?

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That said, my greater source of personal concern, outrage and sympathy beyond this particular case is focused neither upon one night’s property damage nor upon the acts, but is focused rather upon the past four-decade period during which an American political elite have shipped middle class and working class jobs away from Baltimore and cities and towns around the U.S. to third-world dictatorships like China and others, plunged tens of millions of good, hard-working Americans into economic devastation, and then followed that action around the nation by diminishing every American’s civil rights protections in order to control an unfairly impoverished population living under an ever-declining standard of living and suffering at the butt end of an ever-more militarized and aggressive surveillance state.

The innocent working families of all backgrounds whose lives and dreams have been cut short by excessive violence, surveillance, and other abuses of the Bill of Rights by government pay the true price, and ultimate price, and one that far exceeds the importances of any kids’ game played tonight, or ever, at Camden Yards. We need to keep in mind people are suffering and dying around the U.S., and while we are thankful no one was injured at Camden Yards, there is a far bigger picture for poor Americans in Baltimore and everywhere who don’t have jobs and are losing economic civil and legal rights, and this makes inconvenience at a ballgame irrelevant in light of the needless suffering government is inflicting upon ordinary Americans.

Commentary by Baltimore Orioles COO, John Angelos, on the root causes of the unrest

Earlier this week, I published a post titled, Charting the American Oligarchy – How 0.01% of the Population Contributes 42% of All Campaign Cash, which I think is one of the most important articles I’ve written all year. The key point of the piece is that demonizing the 1%, or 3.2 million American citizens, is divisive and counterproductive. Strategically it’s stupid because there will be many decent, intelligent, motivated people within this class who should be recruited as allies rather than demonized with superficial slogans. Moreover, you should never judge anyone based on their wealth and status alone, you should judge each person by their individual actions.

In that post, I highlighted the fact that 25,000 American adults are essentially calling all the public policy shots in the U.S. I went on to argue that the real players are probably the 0.001%, or the 2,500 wealthiest American adults. Even within this extraordinarily wealthy data pool, we still must be careful not to judge them together. Just think about the enlightened commentary made by John Angelos, COO of the Baltimore Orioles and son of the team’s owner, I referenced at the top. The fact that someone of his privilege and wealth understands exactly what is happening in America, and also has the balls to say it, is incredibly encouraging. We must recruit such people to join forces with us rather than alienate them with catchy soundbites

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Know Your Rights – How to Respond When Police Tell You to Stop Filming

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Something I wish I had more time to devote to here at Liberty Blitzkrieg is the topic of “know your rights.” Despite the establishment’s relentless assault on the Bill of Rights, the American citizen still enjoys more liberties than a large percentage of the world’s population. Nevertheless, as important as it is to have these rights, it is equally important to flex them. If we don’t constantly exercise our rights, they’ll ultimately fall victim to atrophy like a vestigial organ.

While the smartphone has proven an excellent tool for the surveillance state, its video function has conversely served as a powerful civil rights tool. So much so that police will often lie to citizens about their right to film them in public, and one State Representative from Texas went so far to try to ban the filing of police (see: Meet Jason Villalba – The Texas State Representative Who Introduced a Bill that Criminalizes Citizens Filming Police).

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Baltimore as a Microcosm of America

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In these drug-saturated neighborhoods, they weren’t policing their post anymore, they weren’t policing real estate that they were protecting from crime. They weren’t nurturing informants, or learning how to properly investigate anything. There’s a real skill set to good police work. But no, they were just dragging the sidewalks, hunting stats, and these inner-city neighborhoods — which were indeed drug-saturated because that’s the only industry left — become just hunting grounds. They weren’t protecting anything. They weren’t serving anyone. They were collecting bodies, treating corner folk and citizens alike as an Israeli patrol would treat Gaza, or as the Afrikaners would have treated Soweto back in the day. They’re an army of occupation. And once it’s that, then everybody’s the enemy. The police aren’t looking to make friends, or informants, or learning how to write clean warrants or how to testify in court without perjuring themselves unnecessarily. There’s no incentive to get better as investigators, as cops.

– From the excellent Marshall Project article: David Simon on Baltimore’s Anguish

Baltimore, Maryland is in many ways the perfect microcosm for these United States of America. If you still don’t get that, you’ll be in for a rude awakening in the years ahead.

A gradual erosion of the Constitution and the civl rights of the citizenry, the abuse of power by people in authority, perverse financial incentives that lead to horrible outcomes, zero accountability, and a ubiquitous surveillance state apparatus; Baltimore has it all. Yet all of these troubling traits have also come to characterize early 21st century America.

As tends to be the case, the populations that have been victimized the longest and most systemically — in Baltimore and across the U.S. — are the poor, weak and disenfranchised.  Like a cancer, corruption, theft, and blatant abuse of the citizenry by the powerful will spread and spread until it consumes everything unless the tumor is removed. It has now spread so deeply and so dangerously throughout American life, the general public will soon have no choice but to confront it and do something about it, or face a total extinction of opportunity and suffer the same desperate fate as the people out in the streets of Baltimore.

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The Dissident Dad – Michigan Proposes Bill to Require Official Visits to Parents Homeschooling Their Children

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The busybodies in Michigan have proposed a new bill directed at children who are homeschooled, which will require two annual home inspections and official state registration.

Stephanie Chang, a Michigan State Representative, is worried that homeschool parents will abuse their children while no one is watching. Apparently, the state wants to be the sole authority on child abuse; including indoctrination, a daily statist pledge for 5-year-olds, and the distribution of criminal records to teens who decide to smoke a plant.

Like dogs and sex offenders, the state wants children registered. As a result, thousands of decent and caring homeschool parents may soon be forced to allow an inspection of their family or be in violation of the law.

The tragedy the state is pointing to in order to push this bill is a 2012 case in which two homeschooled children were tortured, killed, and then left in a freezer by their mother. As tragic as this is, using it to create a new law to infringe on the privacy and sovereignty of 48,000 homeschooled children in Michigan is wrong.

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What Difference Does it Make? 1,100 Foreign Donors to Clinton Foundation Never Disclosed and Remain Secret

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As a condition of becoming Secretary of State, Hillary Clinton signed a memorandum of understanding with the Obama Administration to disclose the donors to the Clinton Foundation due to the obvious potential conflicts of interest. Sounds good, but everyone knows the Clintons don’t pay by the rules, and they just went ahead and didn’t disclose 1,100 foreign donors to the faux charity.

Interestingly, these 1,100 donors funneled the money through the Canadian wing of the Clinton slush fund, the Clinton Giustra Enterprise Partnership (CGEP). This subsidiary of the Clinton Foundation was co-founded by Canadian businessman Frank Giustra, who’s sizable donations to the “charity” have been linked to getting a pass on human rights abuses in Colombia and crony uranium deals in Kazakhstan.

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Baltimore Public School Students Miss Lunch as WholeFoods Hands Out Turkey Sandwiches to the National Guard

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If you’re a high-end grocery store specializing in organic foods operating in the city of Baltimore, and want to ensure your windows don’t get busted in, what do you do? Hand out free turkey and cheese sandwiches to National Guard troops and brag about it on Instagram, of course!

Sure, thousands of public schools students missed their free or reduced priced lunches as area schools were closed, but someone else can deal with that. No doubt the National Guard was severely lacking in supplies.

From Salon:

All Baltimore City public schools were closed on Tuesday in response to violent protests breaking out across the city in response to Freddie Gray’s death. About 84 percent of students in city’s public schools receive free or reduced-price lunches, according to the school district’s website. The closings mean that these students were unable to access these lunches, and churches and community centers have been scrambling to fill the gap. 

That’s why it was so shocking to hear that Whole Foods and Five Guys had taken the initiative to provide free food for National Guard soldiers instead of for thousands of high-need children.

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John Stewart on the Media-Political Complex’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner, aka “Nerd Prom”

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If you want to tell people the truth, make them laugh, otherwise they’ll kill you.

– Oscar Wilde

To the chagrin of the residents of Panem, pockets of plebs became unruly just 40 miles from the Capitol on the most important night of the year for Washington D.C., aka Hollywood for ugly people.

The timing of this gross display of elitist narcissism was once again less than ideal for these self-absorbed societal leeches. If you recall, Barack Obama was similarly engaged in a massive party last year just as Ferguson burst into flames. I noted this in the post: “A Good Time Was Had By All” – The Obamas Dance the Night Away as Ferguson, Missouri Burns.

Whether the above is the expression of a divine sense of humor, or merely a function of Obama’s penchant for frequent fiddling at extravagant galas remains unclear. What is clear; however, is Jon Stewart’s absolutely hilarious take on the event and his justifiably relentless assault on faux news channel CNN when he states:

To be clear, a guy on CNN just said: “If people are looking for news, I’m sure they can find it somewhere.”

This is a must watch:

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Senior Fellow at Sunlight Foundation Calls the Clinton Foundation “A Slush Fund”

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The hits keep on coming. Just last week, in the post, More Clinton Foundation Cronyism – The Deal to Sell Uranium Interests to Russia While Hillary was Secretary of State, I referred to the Clinton Foundation as “a veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.” Here’s the full opening paragraph to the piece:

If you looked at the U.S. economy under a microscope, what you’d see is a gigantic cancerous blob of cronyism surrounded by tech startups and huge prisons. If you zeroed in on the cancerous tumor, at the nucleus you’d see a network of crony institutions like the Federal Reserve, intelligence agencies, TBTF Wall Street banks and defense contractors. Pretty close to that, you’d probably find the Clinton Foundation. A veritable clearinghouse for cronyism masquerading as a charity.

Unsurprisingly, I’m not the only one who has come to such a conclusion. In a New York Post article from Sunday that is generating a lot of buzz, Bill Allison, a senior fellow at nonpartisan, nonprofit government watchdog group the Sunlight Foundation, is quoted saying:

It seems like the Clinton Foundation operates as a slush fund for the Clintons.

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Charting the American Oligarchy – How 0.01% of the Population Contributes 42% of All Campaign Cash

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This is an economic fight, but this is also a political fight. The biggest financial institutions aren’t just big – they wield enormous political power. Last December, Citibank lobbyists wrote an amendment to Dodd-Frank and persuaded their friends in Washington to attach it to a bill that had to pass or the government would have been shut down. And when there was pushback over the amendment, the CEO of JPMorgan, Jamie Dimon, personally got on the phone with Members of Congress to secure their votes. How many individuals who are looking for a mortgage or a credit card could make that call? How many small banks could have their lobbyists write an amendment and threaten to shut down the US government if they didn’t get it? None. Keep in mind that the big banks aren’t trying to make the market more competitive; they just want rules that create more advantages for themselves. The system is rigged and those who rigged it want to keep it that way.

– From Senator Elizabeth Warren’s excellent speech: “The Unfinished Business of Financial Reform”

This is probably one of the most important posts I’ll write all year. The reason is because in order to displace the current paradigm, the public needs to deeply and intellectually understand exactly where the real cancer resides.

I never liked the saying: “We are the 99%.” While admittedly catchy and effective as a slogan, I think it is ultimately divisive and counterproductive. The reason I say this is because the statement itself alienates much needed allies for no good reason.

In a country with a population of 320 million, the 1% represents 3.2 million people, which is a pretty big number. While the 1% certainly have far superior material lives compared to the 99%, that doesn’t mean a particularly large percentage of them are thieves, cronies or oligarchs. In fact, it behooves people interested in transitioning to another paradigm to court as many of them as possible to the cause. It is very useful to have well meaning people with resources and connections on your side. To blithely assume there aren’t plenty of potential allies from a pool of 3.2 million is committing strategic suicide. Indeed, John Hancock came from one of the wealthiest families in the American colonies in the run up to the Revolution, yet he isn’t remembered by history for his family’s tremendous wealth, but for his signature:

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