The Vocabulary of War Criminals

William E. Alberts

In the land of American exceptionalism, bipartisan political leaders make “mistakes” in foreign policy; they do not commit war crimes. The invasion of Iraq offers a much needed case study; and the brother of the president who launched the invasion sets the stage.

Megyn Kelly of Fox News asked 2016 Republican presidential hopeful Jeb Bush about his brother’s pre-emptive war against Iraq: “Knowing what we know now, would you have authorized the invasion?” Bush replied, “I would have and so would have Hillary Clinton, just to remind everybody, and so would have about almost everybody that was confronted with the intelligence they got.” Kelly responded, “You don’t think it was a “mistake?” Bush answered, “In retrospect, the intelligence that everyone saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty.” (“Exclusive: Jeb Bush on relying on brother’s foreign policy advice,” the Kelly file, Fox News, May 12, 2015) The slant of Kelly’s question itself reveals much about the role of mainstream media in redefining a horrible war crime as a “mistake.”

Regarding Jeb Bush, it took him four tries with the press to finally agree with Megyn Kelly that the invasion of Iraq was a “mistake.” The day after putting his brother’s foot in his mouth on Fox News, he was given the opportunity to correct himself with accommodating radio host Sean Hannity. “I interpreted the question wrong, I guess,” he told Hannity. “Clearly there were mistakes as it related to faulty intelligence that led up to the war.” The following day, at a town hall meeting in Reno, he hid behind the American families whose sons and daughters were killed and wounded in Iraq: “Going back in time and talking about hypotheticals . . . does a disservice to them.” And at the same town hall meeting, he finally agreed with conventional hindsight: “Of course, given the power of looking back . . . anybody would have made different decisions. There’s no denying that.” (“The Note: Jeb Bush: 3 Days, 4 Different Answers About Iraq,” By Michael Falcone, ABC News, May 14, 2015) He denied it as long as he could.

Jeb Bush reveals just how deeply ingrained the denial of criminality is in the American exceptionalism psyche. A New York Times story reported on his brush with his brother’s criminality: “Mr. Bush said he would answer the question despite his reservations about the feelings of military families. ‘It is very hard for me to say their lives were lost in vain,’ he said. ‘In fact, they weren’t.’” (italics added) (“Asked, Again, Bush Says No on Invasion of Iraq,” By Michael Barbaro, May 15, 2015) Never mind the hundreds of thousands to over a million Iraqi civilian lives “lost in vain” in a pre-mediated war against a non-threatening, defenseless country. Bush’s obliviousness is about as immoral as one can get.

Jeb Bush would not dare say American “lives were lost in vain,” even if the invasion of Iraq were seen as a “mistake.” Thus how much anger and rebellion of citizens against the political status quo would arise in America—like in Iraq today—if the war were seen as criminal. Perish the thought! And the conventional “hindsight” of “faulty intelligence” has done just that!

“In retrospect,” Jeb Bush said, “the intelligence that everyone saw, that the world saw, not just the United States, was faulty.” For emphasis, he then told Megyn Kelly, “By the way, guess who thinks those mistakes took place as well? George W. Bush.” (“Exclusive: Jeb Bush on relying on brother’s foreign policy advice,” Ibid)

Actually, George W. Bush is trying to have it both ways. In his memoirDecision Points, for which he was reportedly paid a hefty $7 million advance, he wrote, “’No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons . . . The false intelligence proved to be ‘a massive blow to our credibility—my credibility—that would shake the confidence of the American people.’” But Bush had no doubt about his rightness in invading Iraq: “Imagine what the world would look like today with Saddam Hussein still ruler of Iraq . . . He would still be threatening his neighbors, sponsoring terror and piling bodies into mass graves.” (“Unlike His Brother, George W. Bush Stands by His Call to Invade *Iraq,” By Peter Baker,The New York Times, May 15, 2015)

Let’s “imagine what the world would look like today” if George W. Bush had not been president of the United States. There would probably be far more than a million Iraqi mothers and fathers and their children alive today—rather than many “piled into mass graves.” There would not be 1 to 2 million Iraqi widows, nor 5 million orphans. Nor the destruction of Iraq’s infrastructure and diminishing of the Iraqi people’s quality of life. Nor the terrible sectarian violence between Sunnis and Shiites. Nor the birth of the Islamic State, or Isis, which, today, is seeking to match America’s brutality with its own revengeful pursuit of territory.

If George W. Bush had not become president, some 4,500 American military persons would still be alive, with hundreds of thousands more whole, rather than wounded– many struggling to find adequate treatment in a broken VA health care system. Without Bush in power, there might have been a bipartisan political commitment to invest our country’s resources and know-how in everyone’s pursuit of happiness here– rather than sacrificing lives and resources in the death-dealing criminal pursuit of Iraq’s huge oil reserves. There would be love and laughter filling far more American homes today, rather than death and grieving and injury and festering neglect. Without Bush ruling, the American people might have enjoyed real personal and national security—including far more whole persons, rather than wounded warriors.

Regarding Iraq’s assumed weapons of mass destruction, “hindsight” has become the refuge of those who ignored foresight. “No one is more shocked and angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons,” George W. Bush said. “The intelligence that everyone saw was . . . faulty,” Jeb Bush said.

A chorus of Iraqi war apologists chimed in. Republican presidential candidate Marco Rubio told Chris Wallace on Fox News Sunday, “The president was presented with intelligence that said Iraq had weapons of mass destruction.” (‘Was It a Mistake?’: Wallace Presses Rubio on Iraq Invasion,” foxnews.com, May 17, 2015) Republican presidential contender Ted Cruz told The Hill, “The intelligence reports indicated that Iraq was developing weapons of mass destruction that posed a significant national security threat to this country. . . . We now know in hindsight, those intelligence reports were false.” (“Cruz: ‘Of course’ Iraq was a mistake,” By Julian Hattem, May 12, 2015)

Republican presidential aspirant Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker joined the chorus. “I think any president, regardless of party, probably would have made a similar decision to what President Bush did at the time with the information he had available.” (“GOP hopefuls debate: Was Iraq a mistake,?” By Katherine Skiba, LA Times, May 17, 2015) And as reported, “Most of the potential candidates have focused on what they characterize as an ‘intelligence failure’ in the prewar assessments of Iraq’s weapons program.” (Ibid)

Front-running Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton, who voted for the invasion of Iraq when a senator, was upfront about her vote. “I know there have been a lot of questions about Iraq posed to candidates over the last weeks. I’ve made it very clear that I made a mistake, plain and simple, and I have written about it in my book.” (“Hillary Clinton Reiterates” ‘I made a Mistake’ With Iraq War Vote,” By Caitlin MacNeal, talkingpointsmemo, May 19, 2015)

“No one was more shocked or angry than I was when we didn’t find the weapons,” George W. Bush wrote in his memoir. Bush’s fingerprints were all over the “faulty intelligence” on Iraq’s assumed weapons of mass destruction—that “everyone” in “the whole world” was allowed to see.

Paul O’Neill, then President Bush’s Treasury Secretary, said that removing Saddam Hussein from power “was topic ‘A’ 10 days after the inauguration—eight months before September 11.” (“Bush Sought ‘Way’ To Invade Iraq,” www.cbsnews.com, Jan. 11, 2014) And Richard Clarke, Bush’s chief advisor on terrorism, reported that Bush seemed determined to use the 9/11 attacks against America as a pretext to invade Iraq. According to Clarke, Bush told him “to find whether Iraq did this.” And when Clarke replied, “We looked into it . . . [and] there’s no connection,” Bush insisted that he “come back with a report that said Iraq did this.” (“Clarke’s Take on Terror,” www.cbsnews.com, Mar. 21, 2004)

Most telling are the comments of UN Chief weapons inspector Hans Blix. His team was effectively stopped from continuing its search for weapons of mass destruction in Iraq when President Bush launched the pre-emptive invasion. Over two months before the invasion, Blix said, “We have now been there [in Iraq] for some two months and been covering the country in ever widening sweeps and we haven’t found any smoking guns.” (“Blix Says No Smoking Guns found in Iraq,” By Edith M. Lederer, Associated Press, Global Policy Forum, Jan. 9, 2003) Later Blix was reported to have “lamented” the aborting of the UN inspections by Bush’s invasion of Iraq. A Boston Globe story quoted Blix: “I don’t think it is reasonable to close the door to inspections after 3 ½ months.” He “would have welcomed some months more. . . . While inspectors followed up leads from US intelligence,” the story continued, “Blix said, ‘I must regret we have not found the results in so many cases. We certainly have not found any smoking guns.” (“Blix Doubts Iraq Will Use Bioweapons,” By Elizabeth Neuffer, Mar. 19, 2003)

A year after the invasion, Hans Blix stated in an interview at UC Berkeley, “There were about 700 inspections, and in no case did we find weapons of mass destruction.” And “ his work in Iraq was cut short when the United States and the United Kingdom took disarmament into their own hands in March of last year.” Blix also said, “Had the inspections been allowed to continue . . . there would likely be a very different situation in Iraq today. As it was, America’s pre-emptive, unilateral actions ‘have bred more terrorism there and elsewhere.’” (“U.N. weapons inspector Hans Blix faults the Bush administration for lack of ‘critical thinking’ in Iraq,” By Bonnie Azab Powell,www.berkeley.edu, Mar. 18, 2004)

In a later 2004 interview with the guardian newspaper, Hans Blix said that he was “smeared by the Pentagon.” Why? “’Towards the end the [Bush] administration leaned on us,’ he conceded, hoping the inspectors would employ more damning language in their reports to swing votes on the UN security council.” How was he “smeared?” “I have my detractors in Washington. There are bastards who spread things around, of course, who planted nasty things in the media.” One of the “nasty things,” the story reported, was that “the happily married father of two was being branded in Baghdad as a ‘homosexual who went to Washington every two weeks to pick up [his] instructions.’” (“Blix: I was smeared by the Pentagon, By Helena Smith in New York, June 10, 2003)

“The false intelligence proved to be a massive blow to our credibility—my credibility.” It is more damning than George W. Bush would have everyone believe.

In an April 23, 2006 CBS TV “60 Minutes” news program, Tyler Drumheller, a top CIA officer, revealed that paid informant, Iraqi Foreign Minister Naji Sabir, a member of Saddam Hussein’s inner circle, “told us that they have no active weapons of mass destruction program.” Drumheller also disclosed that six months before America invaded Iraq, C.I.A. Director George Tenet delivered Sabir’s intelligence breakthrough news at a meeting attended by President Bush, Vice President Dick Cheney and Condeleezza Rice, then national security advisor. They were only interested in intelligence that would justify their decision to invade Iraq. Drumheller said, “The group preparing for the Iraq war came back and said they’re no longer interested.” When “60 Minutes” host Ed Bradley asked, “What about the intel?,” he continued, “they said it isn’t about intel anymore. It’s about regime change.” Bradley responded, “It directly contradicts what the president and his staff were telling us.” Drumheller replied, “The policy was set. The war in Iraq was coming and they were looking for intelligence to fit . . . to justify the policy.”

Tyler Drumheller’s concluding comment: “Many people want to believe the president. Relatives who I tried to talk to about this said, ‘You can’t tell me the president had this information and just ignored it.’ But,” he concluded, “I think over time, people will look back on this and see it was, this is going to be one of the great, I think, policy mistakes of all time.” (Ibid)

Mohamed ElBaradei, former UN nuclear inspector “look[ed] back” and called it a crime, not a “policy mistake.” In his memoir, The Age of Deception, ElBaradei states “that Bush administration officials should face an international criminal investigation for the ‘shame of a needless war’ in Iraq.” The Nobel Peace Prize-winning Egyptian “accuses U.S. leaders of ‘grotesque distortion’ in the run-up to the 2003 Iraq invasion, when then President George W. Bush and his lieutenants claimed Iraq possessed doomsday weapons despite contrary evidence collected by ElBaradei and other arms inspector inside the country.” (ElBaradei suggests war crimes probes of Bush team,” The Monitor, Apr. 22, 2011)

Mohamed ElBaradei writes that he “’was aghast’” at “the official U.S. attitude before the March 2003 invasion, which he calls ‘aggression where there is no imminent threat,’ a war in which he accepts estimates that hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians were killed.’” (italics added) Thus he believes “the World Court should be asked to rule on whether the war was illegal. And, if so, ‘should not the International Criminal Court investigate whether this constitutes a war crime and determine who is accountable?’” (Ibid)

One would think that religious leaders especially would be “aghast” at the death sentence the Bush administration imposed on a whole nation of people, and join Mohamed ElBaradei in calling for a war crime investigation. In the Boston area, however, religious leaders are not communicating moral outrage over the indiscriminate, massive death sentence America carried out against the Iraqi people. Rather, their publicized moral struggle is with the death sentence Dzhokhar Tsarnaev recently received for his role in the Boston Marathon bombings– that resulted in the tragic deaths of four persons and injuring to 260 others. “Religious leaders conflicted on death penalty” was the headline of a front-page Boston Globe Metro story, in response to Tsarnaev’s death sentence. And not a word in the story from the religious leaders interviewed about Tsarnaev’s reported reason for causing such terrible deaths and injuries.

Though one of the Boston area religious leaders did flirt in passing with Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s reported motivation. Rev. Gustave Miracle, associate pastor of St. Angela Merici Church in Mattapan, was quoted as saying that “society would be better off to keep him alive . . . and perhaps learn why Tsarnaev decided to detonate one of the two bombs that left three dead and hundreds wounded.” (“Religious leaders conflicted on death penalty,” By Jan Ransom and Jacqueline Tempera, The Boston Globe, May 18, 2015)

The evidence presented at Dzhokhar Tsarnaev’s trial had already indicated why he did it. The motive he allegedly gave is spelled out in the note he apparently wrote in the boat in which he had hidden: “The U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians but most of you already know that. As a M [bullet hole] I cannot stand to see such evil go unpunished. we Muslims are one body, you hurt one you hurt us all.” (“Here’s the Note Dzhokhar Tsarnaev Wrote Inside the Boat Where He Was Captured,” By Eric Levenson, www.boston.com, Mar. 10, 2015)

These words contain an indictment of America. Thus it is far safer for religious leaders and the status quo-guarding media to refer to Dzhokhar Tsarnsev’s motivation in passing, rather than seriously investigate his charge that the “U.S. Government is killing our innocent civilians.” Safer to pass by the horrible death penalty leveled against people in the whole of Iraq. Safer to be “conflicted” about Boston’s Marathon bombing victims and the death sentence given to a young man. But is it safer? Tsarnaev committed blowback violence, and that violence will continue against us Americans as long as we allow our government to plunder and kill other human beings in our name.

This is not to minimize the loss and grieving and struggles of the Marathon bombing victims and their families. Rather it is to point out that all of us need to challenge our political leaders, rather than allow them to continue calling their criminal foreign policy a “mistake.” And religious leaders should be in the forefront: speaking reality and moral truth to political and corporate power, rather than serving as chaplains of the status quo.

Palestine, Israel and Dissent

Robert Fantina

It seems that the United States just can’t prevent itself from protecting Apartheid Israel. Just when it seemed that even U.S. government opinion was turning, the U.S. decided to arrest several members of FIFA (The Fédération Internationale de Football Association; English: International Federation of Association Football or International Federation of Soccer) the day before FIFA was to vote on expelling Israel. The Palestinian Football Association (PFA) had made the request for the vote, based on several Israeli violations of the FIFA charter. These include the following:

* Restricting the movement of Palestinian players, thus preventing them from participating in soccer games;

* Preventing the establishment of Palestinian soccer clubs in East Jerusalem;

* Refusing to issue necessary permits for foreign delegations visits;

* Operating Israeli soccer teams in the occupied West Bank, in violation not only of FIFA rules, but international law as well.

Disabling two promising young Palestinian soccer players, Jawhar Nasser Jawhar, age 19, and Adam Abd Al-Raouf Halabiya, age 17. Israel Defense Forces (IDF) terrorists shot them multiple times in the feet as they walked home from soccer practice on January 31, 2014. Mr. Jawhar was shot in the feet ten times; Mr. Halabiya, once in each foot. They are lucky they can walk; they will never be able to play soccer again.

The rampant corruption of the FIFA is legendary, yet it remains the most viable and, for some reasons, prestigious, soccer association in the world. The expulsion of Israel would send a worldwide message, one that apparently the U.S. isn’t quite ready for the world to hear. What better way to derail it than by arresting several high-ranking FIFA executives, avoiding the vote and the most unpleasant news headlines it might have generated? All FIFA news now will be on the arrests, and that news will fade quickly; few people really care enough to pay attention. But Israel can breathe a sigh of relief, knowing that it once again, thanks to its mentor, dodged another international bullet in its reputation.

Yet it remains wounded; social media is now the prosecution, judge, jury and executioner, wresting those roles from a very resistant U.S., which sees those functions as its sole province. How dare anyone take from U.S. corporate-owned media the role of telling people what is important, and what can be ignored!

But Facebook, Twitter and several other sites have done just that, widely publicizing Israel’s many war crimes, and U.S. complicity in them. As a result, more and more schools and churches are divesting from Israeli companies, fewer entertainers are willing to perform in Israel, and distinguished academics are rejecting invitations to participate in events in Israel.

Well, if the U.S. can’t control the flow of information anymore, it can outlaw that which it doesn’t like. Across the nation, there are measures to stifle protests against U.S. support for Israeli apartheid, and the main targets are the Boycott, Divest and Sanction (BDS) movement and, incredibly, university campuses. The old paradigm of institutions of higher learning as places where students confront new ideas, and are challenged to step out of their comfort zones is, apparently, no longer valid. They are not places where people learn to think, but rather where they are educated to perform whatever jobs corporate America may have to offer, on whatever temporary basis that might be. Students must not be made to feel uncomfortable, as might be the case if a campus Palestinian support group dares to accuse Israel of violating international law. No, much better for the students to sit in their marketing class, learning how to sell some technology product, than care about the plight of brutally oppressed people.

Journalist Saree Makdisi, writing in the LA Times, said this: “What we witness in campus debates over Israel and the Palestinians is an increasingly lopsided affair. While one side draws on historical evidence, international law and United Nations documentation, the other complains that all this makes them feel ‘threatened’ and ‘uncomfortable’.

“Scholarship is not validated by how it makes us feel, however, but by the extent to which it stands up to reason and evidence. To prioritize feelings over arguments — and to police arguments to safeguard feelings — constitutes a dire threat to academic and intellectual freedom, not least because of the mobilization of outside political forces to intervene in on-campus discussions.”

But what is any of this, when ‘vulnerable little’ Israel is under attack? How is that nation expected to defend itself, when all it has to do so is the most advanced weaponry on the planet, and complete impunity from whatever international crimes it commits? Isn’t every criticism of Israel evidence of latent anti-Semitism, just waiting to rear its ugly head in the form of another Holocaust?

The answer, quite clearly, is ‘No’. There is no threat to Israel’s national security; surely, two teenage soccer players can’t be seen as such.

Yet this mindset of a threat everywhere is one that Israel shares with the U.S. One incident is informative. In 1991, a Marine, Corporal Jeff Paterson, refused deployment to the Gulf War. He was charged with desertion, and his actions with ‘threatening the security of the United States’. That the U.S. can seriously believe that one obscure, although outspoken, U.S. Marine could threaten its security by refusing deployment seems to mirror the mindset of Israel, which sees every criticism as threatening its very existence.

Yet identifying and criticizing the horrendous human rights violations of any nation is the responsibility of all global citizens. That the U.S. Congress is owned by the American Israel Political Affairs Committee (AIPAC) will not be enough to protect Israel forever; the cracks in the protective wall that were first exposed by the BDS movement grew with the 2014 genocidal bombardment of Gaza, and have only widened since then. Israel’s desperate attempts to cling to some semblance of legitimacy were all crushed with the formation of the new, racist, apartheid government. The world has awakened; Palestine will be free.

Changing the World for Profit

Ron Jacobs

The system of capitalism is arguably the most complete economic system ever invented by humans. Once it is established in a society, it begins to assume control over that society; from its marketplace to its schools; from its food supply to its entertainment. Nothing is safe from its ever-expanding reach. That which cannot serve the buyers and sellers in the system is left by the wayside. Wars are fought to protect and open markets and resources. Products of questionable value and even safety are advertised and sold to unsuspecting consumers and protections against such products are removed because of overwhelming pressure from the industries involved.

Humans, once believing that their value resided in their work and what they helped produce, are convinced their real value lies in what they can buy. Consumption has become the defining characteristic of human life. Our politicians are products and so are their politics. Ideas are part of the marketplace and schools—where ideas are traditionally traded and considered—are now just one more point of sale. For too many of those in the social system defined by a capitalist economy, change comes not from political action but from what products one purchases. Well-meaning individuals shop at this store or the other because they are led to believe they are making the world a better place. Meanwhile, the very nature of capitalism ensures our continued demise.

This exasperating and depressing situation has been the topic of millions of words worth of writing and discussion. From Karl Marx’s first words on the subject back in the mid nineteenth century to Max Weber and any number of twentieth century social scientists; and from Rosa Luxembourg’s tracts to the latest by authors like David Harvey and Sherry Wolf (who writes on gender and sexuality.) Most of these works have approached the questions implicit in this economic and social arrangement with a broad brush, pointing out the ways in which capitalism has influenced, mutated and even destroyed human relationships. If one looks at these works historically, from Marx to Harvey and Wolf, the destructive aspect is the ever more dominant element of this history. In other words, as capitalism has changed from that of early industrial capitalism during Marx’s time to the neoliberal global phenomenon it is now (Harvey and Wolf’s period) the destructive side of capitalism has far outweighed its positive and creative elements.

Keeping in line with this trend in criticism, a recently published book by Nicole Aschoff chooses four modern super-capitalist individuals and institutions and dissects their role in maintaining the capitalist hold on our society. Unlike capitalist bogeymen like the Koch brothers and Donald Trump, these four examples talk the talk of feminist empowerment, saving the planet, and healing and educating the children of the world. Their names are Sheryl Sandberg of Facebook and “lean-In” fame, Whole Foods, Oprah, and the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation. Although all are currently equated with good deeds and humanitarianism, the reality behind the façade of good deeds is somewhat different.

This is precisely what Aschoff explores in her book, The New Prophets of Capital. During the course of her exploration, the reader discovers that the intentions of those involved in capitalist endeavors for social change are ultimately irrelevant. When all is said and done, it is the pursuit of profit that defines what these endeavors will accomplish. Consequently, if they do not accomplish this ultimate goal, they will not persevere. Either their designers will cease their operations or the marketplace will do it for them. That is the harsh reality of the capitalist system. As history makes plain, attempts to modify this mechanism in a humane direction can only succeed for a limited amount of time. This is true on both the macro and micro scale.

In a quote that summarizes the nature of the endeavors described in The New Prophets of Capital, Aschoff writes about the Gates Foundation’s work in health care and education: “instead of alleviating the ills of capitalist markets,” she writes, “the Gates Foundation’s policies deepen the reach of capitalist markets to provision of basic human needs.” In doing so, these policies and practices also expand and reinforce the growing levels of inequality present in the world. In a similar manner, each of the other examples cited in this text incorporate an element of the movement for social justice into the neoliberal capitalist order. In doing so, they not only limit the possibilities of that movement, but they set it up for the likelihood of creating its opposite, further entrenching the current upward movement of wealth and the subsequent impoverishment of the majority of the world’s population, with all of its consequences. The New Prophets of Capital makes this perfectly clear and does so in a straightforward, concise and impressive manner.

Hollywood and the Uses of Disaster

Binoy Kampmark

Where there is a natural disaster of epic proportion, Hollywood is bound to be around the corner seeking to lap it up. Salivating stars are propelled to misery, and big black holes become sites of opportunity for incandescent hope.

In January 2010, we saw the Angelina Jolie and Brad Pitt publicity machine give over $1 million to Doctors Without Borders for the Haiti appeal. At stages it even seemed that donors were seeking to outdo each other. The biggest wallets were meant to front up with heart and good will, outperforming others in a seedy corporate system of donations. There were the tweet challenges. There were the busy telethons. Call up, donate. Fork out, or be damned.

Actress Alyssa Milano, goodwill ambassador to Unicef, even went so far as to throw down the gauntlet to corporate America, a fascinating mirroring of values. “I cried and then I did the only thing I could do… I wrote a check to the US Fund for Unicef for $50,000.” Writing in the Huffington Post (Mar 18, 2010), Milano would speak of her work for Unicef as a series of tourist disaster gigs, a travel log of misery jottings. “I traveled to Angola in 2004, only two years after the peace treaty was signed ending a 27 year civil war. In 2005, I went to India for the 6-month anniversary of the tsunami.” Be on the scene; catch the gloom.

The effect of such disaster anticipation is cinematic – preparatory efforts are made to ready her for the jump into a land of mayhem and natural cruelties. Then come the usual symptoms of middleclass, or at the very least, actor’s guilt. “Sure, I had seen pictures from both places prior to my trips. I watched videos and tried to prepare myself.” Of course, she reminds readers, nothing every quite readies you for the authentic.

The latest round of gory sentimentalising from the Hollywood entertainment complex has issued forth from Susan Sarandon, who has been doing the rounds in devastated, earthquake ravaged Nepal. The message? Tourism – and more of it. On CNN, she was featured with the expected human ornament heavy with tackiness – the news network’s anointed hero, Pushpa Basnet. Sarandon insisted that, despite whole areas being levelled, monuments could still be seen, museums visited.

As for donations themselves, Sarandon has been issuing a caveat haloed by her expertise. “It is important that money is sent to places which need it. People are open-hearted but are not diligent enough to see if the stuff they are sending is actually needed.” Not content with that summation, the thespian suggested that she had the local knowledge, an awareness about what exactly was going on the ground. “I have seen some groups here who are actually accomplishing things so I can help with that.”

Sarandon is also a serial visitor to places of acute devastation. One of her themes is that of the “familiar” house built in the aftermath. These are houses of some resistance, designed to resist the effects of the approaching monsoon. “I have seen this in New Orleans and New York, that you want to help people but with their dignity intact and find their personal objects and the things they have lost.” At a certain point, the paternalistic defender arches up to insist on protecting the dignitas of the subject. Blessed are the poor, because they will save us. Much like concerned adults over vulnerable children. “So they still have a sense of place and home. They are not constantly having things thrown at them and they participate.”

While she can hardly be blamed for some depictions of her, it is still striking that the thespian rarely leaves that allocated role in the popular imaginary. Nothing illustrated this convergence between the violence of natural disaster, and the contrivance of Hollywood sympathy, than the Daily Mail’s description of Sarandon’s fashion on site.

First, the necessary remarks about “two powerful earthquakes which killed thousands of people and posed a serious threat to the nation’s tourism industry, which many need to survive.” Then, a mention about the work with the non-profit outfit Live to Love, with the usual overview about her personal life – splitting up with “boyfriend of five years, 38-year-old filmmaker Jonathan Bricklin.” Proportion is everything in such commentary.

Props are needed, and nothing better presents itself for the camera than a disaster being shaped for popular consumption, with its staged faces, its desperation, its calling. Naturally, the actor shows empathy, a cruel suggestion given that acting, by its very nature, deceives one into envisaging such empathy. This is the catharsis of cruelty. “Empathetic: The Tammy star stopped to comfort a citizen of Ramkot Village, who lost her husband and daughter because of the earthquake.” She was also “caring” and keen to visit those who had lost homes. Plato’s suspicion about thespians and their calibre should never be forgotten.

The most interesting feature to the Daily Mail piece, however, lay in the realm of fashion. Priorities had to be noted. “Susan dressed comfortably for the trip, sporting a fitted black T-shirt and loose-fitting patterned black trousers.” When one travels to earthquake devastated areas, one’s wardrobe should be in good working order.

The fashion genie was particularly busy on this day, noting the coupling “with a coordinated white scarf, and finished off the laid-back look with a pair of black boots.” This is the fashion of the disaster zone, the land of suffering and misery, the saint of the wardrobe. Ultimately, it is all acting.

Monsanto’s Chemical War in Colombia

W.T. Whitney Jr.

Monsanto Corporation’s glyphosate, sold as “Roundup,” is the world’s most widely used herbicide. For the globalized capitalist economy it’s a tool for wealth accumulation and, secondarily, for subjugating rural populations. In Colombia glyphosate is a weapon of war. For 20 years the U.S. and Colombian governments have used glyphosate in their so-called drug war to eradicate coca crops. Glyphosate now returns to the news. The occasion is ripe for a look at the herbicide’s outsized role in the world economy and its dire effects everywhere.

Acting on President Juan Manuel Santos’ recommendation, Colombia’s National Drug Council on May 14 banned aerial spraying of glyphosate. The ruling has implications for beleaguered rural life in Colombia due to far-reaching effects of the chemical. They are due mainly to the aerial – spray method of delivering glyphosate, which is unique to Colombia. The decision also bears on peace negotiations in Havana between FARC rebels and the Colombian government because the drug war serves as cover for war against the FARC, at least according to the government’s political opposition.

The government’s action was in response to a March 20, 2015 statement from the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer. The claim there was that glyphosate is “probably carcinogenic to humans”, that it causes “DNA and chromosomal damage in human cells [and there is] convincing evidence that [it] also can cause cancer in laboratory animals.” Even so, days before the government’s announcement, U.S. Ambassador in Colombia Kevin Whitaker publically called for continuation of the fumigation program.

Glyphosate gained worldwide usage and Monsanto – not the chemical’s sole manufacturer – became its leading purveyor due in each instance to the chemical’s biological function. It kills all growing plants within reach, with one exception, which is: a crop grown from seeds genetically altered to resist glyphosate’s noxious effects. That crop thrives; everything else, particularly weeds, dies. And Monsanto conveniently sells both the seeds and the herbicide.

Colombian authorities long ago licensed Monsanto to import and sell genetically modified seeds for human use and for animal feeds. The government’s decision on fumigations does not affect those regulations or the use of glyphosate for crops.

Together with Dow Chemical, Monsanto produced the dioxin- containing defoliant “Agent Orange” that the U.S. military used in Vietnam. Drug war fumigations in Colombia recall that misadventure.Adverse effects have included loss of soil fertility, widespread deforestation, destruction of crops farmers grow for food, water contamination, and a plague of human ailments. Anecdotal evidence suggests increased prevalence of cancers and birth defects.

Until now health warnings on glyphosate have fallen on deaf ears, maybe due to Monsanto Corporation’s lobbying power with government regulators. Data taken from the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency suggest Monsanto knew about glyphosate’s potential for human toxicity in 1981. Animal studies then and since have shown that low-dose glyphosate causes “precancerous conditions” and also kidney damage that continues through generations. Recent studies from Europe, Argentina, and the United States have demonstrated glyphosate’s presence in human milk, urine, and blood. The Colombian government in 2008 paid Ecuador for harm caused by glyphosate sprayed along their common border and has prohibited fumigations on or near national parks. Lawyers in Los Angeles recent initiated a class action law suit against Monsanto alleging false advertising; Monsanto claimed that the herbicide “targets an enzyme only found in plants and not in humans or animals.”

Spraying has contributed to fear and poverty in targeted regions. Consequently, rural populations, Afro-Colombians and indigenous peoples particularly, have had to abandon small landholdings and move into cities, or take up residence in neighboring countries. Estimates of 6.3 million displaced Colombians rank second to figures applying to Syria, the world leader in that category. Some 80 percent of displaced Colombians live in poverty, 35.5 percent in extreme poverty; Colombia’s overall rural poverty rate is 65 percent. Departing families have left behind 17.5 million acres to be taken over for large-scale agricultural operations, mining projects and cattle ranching.

Indeed, Monsanto Corporation has “strode the globe like a colossus” (in the words of an old saying). Monsanto is first in the world in seed production, accounting for 41 percent of all seeds and 90 percent of genetically-modified seeds. It ranks 5th in pesticide production. Monsanto is now trying to buy Swiss – based Syngenta Corporation, first and third in the world for pesticide and seed sales, respectively. The combined entity would generate $45 billion in annual income and control 54 percent and 33 percent, respectively, of world seed and pesticide sales.

Popular mobilizations against Monsanto, ongoing for years, have mounted recently, particularly in India, Hungary, Germany, and Argentina. In Colombia, politically left opposition groups, FARC peace negotiators among them, are backing the government’s decision to end glyphosate fumigations. They are calling upon the government to bolster farmers’ capabilities for producing and marketing food crops thus enabling them to give up coca growing. They say: no more aerial sprayings, plan for sustainable rural development, protect human health and the environment, and defend national sovereignty – no more “ceding to pressures from the United States … and Monsanto.”

U.S. government backing for Monsanto Corporation extends far beyond instigation of glyphosate areal fumigations in Colombia. The Trans-Pacific Partnership, an Obama administration project at issue now, would open up Asian nations to sales of genetically modified seeds and agricultural chemicals. Critics say the pact will injure farmers there just as NAFTA hurt Mexican farmers and the U.S.-Colombia Free Trade Agreement is injuring Colombian farmers.

Presidential candidate Hillary Clinton has voiced support for multinational corporations involved with agriculture, notably Monsanto. In 2014 Monsanto donated half a million dollars to the Clinton Family Foundation while spending more than $3 million on congressional lobbying.

Politics as an Elite Sport

Serge Halimi

Demonstrations, participation in elections and the exercise of power are political activities with a common characteristic: the working classes are moving away from them or feel excluded from them. When millions of people in France showed their solidarity on 11 January with the victims of the Charlie Hebdo attacks, there was a marked contrast between middle-class mobilisation and the smaller numbers of working-class and young people from deprived areas who turned out. Popular protest has been an increasingly middle-class activity for years, as has voting: in almost every election, the participation rate declines further down the income scale. And those who “represent” the nation are certainly no better, as they are almost identical to society’s upper echelons. This is politics as an elite sport.

This is clear in the European left. The unions set up the UK Labour Party to represent working-class voters. In 1966, 69% of manual workers voted Labour; this fell to 45% by 1987, and 37% in last month’s election. Blairites thought the focus needed to be on the middle classes. This mission was accomplished: the party suffered a resounding defeat with the most middle-class electorate in its history (see Will the Labour Party survive?, page 2).

“Growing working-class disillusionment with leftwing parties, visible in all western democracies, is probably not unconnected to the declining numbers of politicians from the least well-off parts of society who have experienced similar lives,” says political scientist Patrick Lehingue. Consider that in 1945, 25% of French members of parliament had been labourers or employees before election; that has now fallen to 2.1%. In 1983, 78 mayors of municipalities with more than 30,000 inhabitants had once been labourers or ordinary office workers (these still account for the majority of the population). Now there are only six (1). So much for representative democracy.

More than 50% of Americans think the state should redistribute wealth through more taxation of the rich. Only 17% of the rich, unsurprisingly, share that view (2). But the way western democracies work means that the minority opinion prevails without any real debate. And a class well aware of its own interests can afford to be relaxed, since public debate is so dominated by distractions whipped up by the media that it owns, which help divide the working-class against itself.

With this system so well entrenched, all we can do is call in the experts whose job it is to remind us that apathy and anger are to be expected when societies move to the right.

The Missile Race in South Asia

Shams uz Zaman

Islamabad, Pakistan.

Conventional asymmetry is growing in South Asia as India takes the top position in global arms import according to recently released data by SIPRI. While India has frequently cited China as the principal factor behind the defence spending, skeptics see India’s quest for global status the main force driving behind Indian nuclear and missile ambitions. Successive visits by U.S. presidents, both from democrat and republican camps also manifest Indian significance in the U.S. strategic calculus. Obama’s second visit to India came at a time once U.S. relations with Russia were at rock bottom since end of the first cold war. Beijing is also sharing a deep disquiet over the U.S. strategic initiatives launched in the region, most importantly off-shore rebalancing policy in Asia-Pacific region, which presumably is aimed at containment of China. Indian role therefore has become critical for Washington’s regional and global ambitions and the former now serves as a proxy for the latter against China.

Indo-U.S. nuclear deal has exuberated security concerns in Pakistan. Islamabad is also viewing other developments with deep concern, like for example joint Indo-Israeli collaboration in missile defence and state of the art military equipment procurement by India from different states. For Pakistan, these developments would ostensibly alter the strategic balance in South Asia. India on the other hand is also in process of developing new range of missiles and nuclear warheads. Indian plans to mount MIRVs on nuclear capable Agni V missile is also cautiously being watched by Beijing and Islamabad. China is also looking at modernizing its own nuclear and missile capabilities due to developments in India. The economic muscle provides China enough leverage to invest more on conventional defence capabilities which precisely is not an option available to Pakistan. Resultantly, Islamabad would become more reliant on its nuclear and missile options in a bid to restore the regional balance. Development of low yield short range Nasr missile and recent testing of Shaheen III missile, thus bringing every part of India in its strike range, signifies this trend. Reliance on nuclear capable missiles by states situated in conflict prone region holds inherent risks of nuclear exchange in a flurry of uncontrollable events.

South Asian deterrence model is not premised on bilateral equation but rather is triangular in nature which makes it even more complex than the cold war model of nuclear deterrence. Although this triangular relationship gets further influenced whenever there is a change in the strategic or nuclear capabilities and postures of the U.S. or Russia, yet the developments in India and Pakistan remains the predominant factor which fuels the regional arms competition. Indian nuclear tests on May 11, 1998, which also included a tactical nuclear device of 0.2 KT, not only led to the overt nuclearization of South Asia but introduction of tactical nuclear warheads in the region as well. Pakistan demonstrated its own nuclear muscle, subsequently developing short range Nasr missile capable of carrying low yield short range nuclear warheads, to neutralize Indian conventional threat and tactical nuclear warheads. Both Pakistan and India have developed new type of missiles which would subsequently be mounted on the naval platforms, thus giving them an assured second strike capability. This tit for tat action-reaction syndrome continues unabated and is gradually spiraling into a nuclear and missile arms race which risks getting out of control over unresolved disputes between India and Pakistan. The popular uprisings in Kashmir and sporadic firing incidents along the Line of Control illustrates that situation remains extremely fragile between the two nuclear armed rivals.

Indian nuclear agreements with several western governments, allowing it to import huge stocks of uranium, along with the proposal to make India a formal member of the Nuclear Suppliers Group (NSG) would enable New Delhi, in future, to rapidly expand its nuclear stockpiles. Indian Missile Defence Shield, even at an embryonic stage, would seemingly instill a false sense of security amongst the Indian policy makers, thus making them prone to audacious behavior especially in a crisis like situation. In anticipation to this plausibility, Pakistan is rapidly multiplying its nuclear warheads, besides evaluating the option to mount MIRVs on intermediate range nuclear capable missiles. These developments in South Asia are bound to influence the perceptions in Beijing, Moscow and even Tel Aviv. Russia and China are already in a process of modernizing their nuclear arsenals in response to U.S. nuclear revitalization plans, while Israel has also developed and successfully tested an Inter Continental Ballistic Missile (ICBM) capable of reaching India, Pakistan and even China. Such trends would ostensibly expand the specter of missiles arms race from regional to global scale.

The nuclear and missile race in South Asia is gradually gaining momentum. Due to unresolved disputes, the region would remain a nuclear flash point posing a persistent threat of accidental or inadvertent nuclear war. Mitigating threats entails engaging in a meaningful and constructive dialogue aimed at settling these long outstanding disputes and implementing strategic restraint regime measures. Without resorting to such steps arms control and disarmament would remain unfulfilling prophecies.

What Price India’s Future?

Colin Todhunter

Drip and drip again. It’s a walk through Triplicane. It’s a walk through the Triplicane and Royapettah areas of Chennai in July. It’s hot here. It’s always hot here. Watch your back. Watch your front. And, by the way, watch your side as well. Those mopeds, those scooters, those autos, those guided missiles from all directions. Around here, you walk in the road. Around here, city planners didn’t plan for much.

A rush past half a dozen dimly lit pharmacy shops stacked to the rafters with boxes, bottles and more boxes. A rush past a dozen tiny one room eateries, non-veg, veg, wooden benches, plastic chairs, metal jugs of water on tables and metal mug waiting to be filled. A rush past street side shrines – tridents, Shivas, Nandis, Ganeshes, lingams. Smell the incense, feel the burn, sense the back streets of Triplicane.

It’s dusk. It’s dusk when each minutiae of life, each nuance, becomes more pronounced, more noticeable, in the neon-polluted haze. When traffic roars and darkness gathers. When anticipation prevails. When the aroma of freshly cooked food hangs in the air and women shop and cows munch. When dhabas bustle and chai shops steam. When firecrackers explode and a thousand vehicle horns blast. And through the choking traffic fumes, seated at the roadside, women sell bright yellow marigolds and sweet smelling jasmine.

A sharp left and off into the narrow lanes. Boys play cricket, children fly kites from rooftops. And dogs come to life after a hard day’s sleep in the shade. Intricately drawn kolams on the floor at the entrances to homes fade in the dark. Where art meets ritual, where community meets tradition, where the women who drew them assert their presence. Both young and old stop to offer a prayer at a small shrine, and a child says “hi” and continues with his game.

Look from a distance and see the cityscape. The occasional high rise jostles for space among a million concrete box buildings that spill across the landscape. Triplicane and Royapettah. Splashes in the spill.

The subtle shades of the night, the garish billboards advertising the latest blockbuster. The moustachioed handsome hero of the Tamil movie variety towers tall above the traffic. The hero, who dishes out and is sometimes the recipient of a form of slapstick violence that never really bruises, never really cuts and never really hurts. In make-believe movie-land, the pain is always dulled. Opium for the masses.

And on the corner, by the cracked concrete entrances to the subways that traverse Anna Salai, the main thoroughfare, a bunch of cycle carts parked up. And a bunch of street stalls beckon. Frying, cooking, heating in the roasting night. A quick bite of dosa held in hand, a mouthful of rice shovelled with fingers. Street food served on the street, fast food eaten fast. It’s the India of roadside stoves, pots and pans. It’s the neighbourhood India of the common man, for the common man. It’s community.

It’s the type of small-scale enterprise India that many a politician would readily wrench from neighbourhoods in return for a pocket full of Walmart gold. India’s education system, healthcare system, infrastructure and welfare system has already been sacrificed for many a burgeoning Swiss bank account. Why not the rest of India too? It’s called accumulation by dispossession. It’s called stolen wealth. And the process has accelerated since the opening up of the economy in ’91. The impact is stark, but it’s not unique to India. A cheap con-trick sold to the masses on the road to some bogus notion of the ‘promised land’, some idiotic secular theology of neo-liberal fast track ‘development’.

A promised land of fortune, mansions and lavish living that the tricksters attained years ago – by cartels, force and duplicity masquerading as ‘neo-liberalism’, masquerading as the ‘free’ market. A global market rigged, bought and paid for courtesy of the Rothschilds, Rockefellers, Warburgs or various other billionaire fraudsters before India’s local mom and pop stores were but a twinkle in their parents’ eyes. No, it’s not unique to India. It’s global. Like some of the pesticide-ridden/engineered crops in the fields, or the protruding bellies of the malnourished, it’s not genuine growth, but abnormal swelling. Like the soil sucked dry, people are left to wilt on the vine.

The poverty alleviation rate in India is the same as it was 20 years back. Every second child is underweight and stunted. Eight of India’s states account for more poor people than in the 26 poorest African countries combined. Shopping and consumerism have become the concerns and priorities of India’s misinformed and misled creamy layer. Misinformed by news outlets that pass off infotainment as news. Misinformed by a government that cosies up to western multi-nationals with secretive ‘Memorandums of Understanding’ and then proceeds to target some of the poorest people in the country who resist as ‘the enemy within’.

It’s all a bit of a mad dash this. An insane one. A corrupt one. We need to move to a different beat, to travel in a different direction, to make peace with our future.

Who’s the Real “Menace to Society”: Journalist or Leading Psychiatrist?

Bruce E. Levine

On April 26, 2015, Jeffrey Lieberman, former president of the American Psychiatric Association, stirred up controversy by calling investigative journalist Robert Whitaker a “menace to society” on CBC radio because Whitaker, in his book Anatomy of an Epidemic, had challenged the long-term effectiveness of psychiatric medication.

But is it Whitaker or Lieberman who has been a menace to society?

Lieberman, the APA president through May 2014, is currently making the media rounds with his new book Shrinks. But earlier in his career, Lieberman conducted experiments in which patients diagnosed with schizophrenia were given a psychostimulant drug with Lieberman’s expectation that this drug would be “psychotogenic” (induce symptoms of psychosis), and this deterioration in fact occurred.

Robert Whitaker, as an investigative journalist, won the George Polk award for medical reporting and was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize for Public Service for his 1998 Boston Globe series “Doing Harm: Research on the Mentally Ill” (co-authored with Dolores Kong). In this series, Whitaker uncovered how Lieberman and other psychiatrists, exploring the biology of psychosis, conducted experiments on more than 2,000 patients in which certain drugs were administered and other drugs withheld in the expectation of worsening symptoms.

The Nuremberg Code of research ethics, established after the horrific human experiments by doctors in Nazi Germany, states that medical experiments on human subjects “should be so conducted as to avoid all unnecessary physical and mental suffering and injury.” This is obvious ethics, as one would hope that only Nazi doctors would see nothing wrong with using human subjects to test whether hypothesized harmful agents are in fact harmful.

Lieberman’s Experiments

In his Globe series, Whitaker details how psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation experiments were pioneered in 1974 by David Janowsky, who reported success in developing a new tool for studying schizophrenia. Janowsky found that giving diagnosed schizophrenics the psychostimulant drug methylphenidate (Ritalin, Concerta) caused “a dramatic intensification of pre-existing symptoms, such as hallucinations and delusions” and that other psychostimulants such as amphetamines also exacerbated psychosis. Janowsky’s work established the idea that psychosis-inducing drugs could be used as “challenge agents” for studying psychosis.

In Lieberman’s own 1987 review of 36 studies in which psychostimulant drugs were administered to patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, he concluded that among psychostimulant drugs, methylphenidate has the greatest “psychotogenic potency.” And so Lieberman, in his subsequent experimentation on patients diagnosed with schizophrenia, administered methylphenidate, the psychostimulant with greatest likelihood to do damage.

In 1987, Lieberman conducted a study in which he administered methylphenidate to 34 stable outpatients previously diagnosed with schizophrenia. In this experiment, previously stabilized patients were not only administered methylphenidate but taken off standard antipsychotic drugs until psychotic symptoms reappeared.

In a 1990 study co-authored by Lieberman, “Behavioral Response to Methylphenidate and Treatment Outcome in First Episode Schizophrenia,” the introduction states, “In order to examine the relationship of psychotogenic response to psychostimulants and acute treatment response in treatment-naïve, first-episode psychotic patients, we administered intravenous methylphenidate to first-episode patients.”

On the face of it, this experiment, in which a drug is administered to induce a psychotic reaction, is cruel enough. But it gets worse. Lieberman’s subjects were as young as 14 years old, and he did this experiment on “first-episode psychotic patients,” the majority of whom,research shows, ordinarily recover. Lieberman reports in matter of fact manner that the symptom of distrustfulness “significantly increased following the administration of methylphenidate.” So, patients after having a psychotic episode are administered intravenously a psychostimulant drug designed to induce more psychotic behaviors, and they become more distrustful. It would be remarkable if such “treatment” would not make someone distrustful of doctors, perhaps for the remainder of their lives.

Lieberman reports his schizophrenic subjects and their families were “willing and able to sign informed consent.” The Nuremberg Code states: “The voluntary consent of the human subject is absolutely essential. This means that the person involved should have the legal capacity to give consent.” Who in their right mind would give consent for themselves or for a family member for a procedure that was hypothesized to make a patient worse?

In Whitaker’s Globe 1998 series within the segment “Testing Takes Human Toll,” he interviewed Lieberman about his and other psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation experiments. Lieberman asserted, “To say that increasing a particular symptom—like hearing voices for a couple of hours in somebody who has been hearing voices for 10 years—is causing [suffering] rather seems like a stretch.”

Beyond the callousness of his response to Whitaker, Lieberman is simply not telling the truth. Recall his 1990 study was done on “first-episode psychotic patients,” not on “somebody who has been hearing voices for 10 years.”

Lieberman is elsewhere dishonest—or amazingly ignorant. In justifying why he called Whitaker a “menace to society,” Lieberman stated on CBC radio that research does not support Whitaker’s claim that many people diagnosed with serious mental illness do better in the long term without psychiatric medication. But the validity of Whitaker’s claim was acknowledged in 2013 by the director of the National Institute of Mental Health who pointed to some of the same research as had Whitaker. The NIMH director in fact concluded, “We need to ask whether in the long-term, some individuals with a history of psychosis may do better off medication.” It is difficult to imagine that Lieberman is ignorant of the NIMH director’s agreement with Whitaker.

Lieberman’s psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation studies are not his only experiments that have upset ethicists. Lieberman’s CAFE  (Comparison of Atypicals in First Episode of Psychosis) study on the effectiveness of antipsychotic drugs, conducted between 2002-2005, has been severely criticized by Carl Elliott, bioethics professor at the University of Minnesota. Elliott detailed how one CAFE subject who committed suicide was coerced into the study, and because of his psychotic state was incapable of giving informed consent.

Why Would the APA Elect Lieberman President?

Whitaker’s Boston Globe series was actually not about Lieberman per sebut was really an indictment of the institution of psychiatry for large-scale psychotic inducement research. Whitaker wrote:

In their published accounts, doctors have told of injecting mentally ill patients with drugs designed to exacerbate their delusions and hallucinations. In prestigious journals, they have described studies in which they withheld effective antipsychotic medication from desperate patients who stumbled into hospital emergency rooms. In precise, clinical terms, they have reported how they deliberately stopped giving medication to stabilized schizophrenic patients to see how quickly they became sick again. These studies were designed to gain knowledge that might lead to improved treatments for schizophrenia and related illnesses. But the experiments offered no possibility of therapeutic benefit to the subjects and exposed them to some measure of psychic pain and risk of long-term harm. Moreover, this controversial line of experimentation has been marked by repeated instances in which researchers failed to fully disclose the risks to the mentally ill patients and obscured their true purposes.

Adil Shamoo, professor of biochemistry at the University of Maryland School of Medicine and founder of the journal Accountability in Research, compared these psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation studies to the Tuskegee syphilis studies in which infected black men were denied treatment. Shamoo told Whitaker in 1998, “I think [these psychotic provocation experiments] are in a category that is worse than Tuskegee. . .There are large numbers [of subjects], and these are current practices. Do they cause harm? Of course they do.”

Psychotic exacerbation and provocation experiments, Whitaker reported, were conducted by prominent researchers at the National Institute of Mental Health and at close to a dozen leading medical schools. Patient subject for these studies were largely drawn from outpatient clinics, Veterans Affairs hospitals, state mental institutions, and emergency rooms—settings that regularly provide care to the poor and uninsured. Whitaker noted, “In the few studies that recorded the ethnic makeup of patients, 54 percent were minorities.”

Not surprisingly, Whitaker also discovered that researchers routinely failed to fully disclose the true purposes of their experiments, and withheld information about risks, “The Globe’s review of informed-consent forms for symptom-exacerbation studies at the NIMH [National Institute of Mental Health] and four other leading psychiatric institutions failed to turn up a single one in which the researchers directly stated that a chemical agent would be used purposely to exacerbate psychotic symptoms.”

George Annas, chairman of the Health Law Department at Boston University School of Public Health, told Whitaker, “We let researchers do things to people with mental illness that we would never let them do to people with physical illness.”

Why would the American Psychiatric Association elect Lieberman president in 2012? Because psychiatry sees nothing wrong with these psychotic symptom exacerbation and provocation experiments.

Non-sociopathic people feel guilt or shame for having induced suffering in other human beings, so how could the APA not feel guilt or shame about Lieberman and other psychiatrists conducting experiments that create psychotic symptoms and suffering? The answer to this question takes us to a very dark place.