And did the Bush Administration conspire to help him?

So what encouraged Saakashvili to make his reckless gamble? Partly it was the ambivalent policy of the Bush administration, which told the Georgian leader one month that "We always fight for our friends" (as Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice said in July in Tbilisi about Georgia's bid to join NATO) and the next month cautioned restraint. And partly it was cheerleading from the pro-Georgia lobby, in which McCain has been one of the loudest voices.

Let's put aside the fact that McCain's top foreign policy adviser, Randy Scheunemann, has in fact been a lobbyist for Georgia. In his own feisty comments in recent months, McCain encouraged Georgians to believe America would back them up in a crisis. That expectation was naive, and it was wrong to encourage it. It was especially wrong to give a volatile leader such as Saakashvili what he evidently imagined was an American blank check.

When: January 20, 2009

What: A twilight of relevancy

WTF: There’s no shortage of memorabilia celebrating Dubya’s final 24 hours of power, by which I mean someone of extreme prescience has trademarked the date itself. Well you can stop looking forward to the third Sunday of the first month right now, my friends, because that’s exactly when the worst shit comes to pass and hits the fan in the process and the resultant shit fallout seeps into your drinking water.

By Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Researcher, ACLU Human Rights Program. Jennifer is in Guantánamo for the pre-trial hearings of Mohammed Jawad, Omar Khadr and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul.

Friday morning, a determined and defiant Ali Hamza Ahmed Sulayman al-Bahlul (PDF) appeared before the military commission. Escorted by military police holding each of his wrists, al-Bahlul wore a tan prison uniform and flip-flops. He wasn’t carrying his "boycott" sign, which he created back in January 2006 and has held during subsequent hearings. We soon realized that this was the reason for a half-hour delay in the hearing’s start time.

Given the McCain "Cross in the Sand" story and his appearance in two of these films, you should make an effort to see these and pass them on to fence sitting friends who need an additional wake up call

I stopped by the local DVD rental house on Thursday and given the dearth of decent possibilities I found myself in the "special section" where people rarely go.

I found a goldmine of well crafted 90 minute anti-Republican commercials that filled my past two days with rage and crushing depression. These are "must see" films that strike hard at Republican Moral Values.

It is Sunday.  I open my Washington Post, B Section, and on the inside is a piece with a long introduction by Josh White, explaining of his long interest in a man originally known as Detainee #261, who tried to kill himself when his lawyer stepped out of the room, whom the U. S. long asserted was a dangerous terrorist who had tried to recruit others and who was arrested in Afghanistan, where he had ostensibly gone to fight for the Taliban.   And yet, despite having been held  at Gitmo since January 2002 and having been subjected to brutal treatment,

Nevertheless, he was never charged with a crime, never admitted any connection to terrorism and was ultimately released to Saudi Arabia in July 2007.

White has stayed in touch with the man, whose real name is Jumah al Dossari.  And the bulk of the piece are his words, and they are entitled I'm Home, but Still Haunted by Guantanamo.  Remember, he was in the custody of our government, held and mistreated by our personnel.  This was done in our name.  And miraculously, he offers no bitterness in his words.

By Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Researcher, ACLU Human Rights Program. Jennifer is in Guantánamo for the pre-trial hearings of Mohammed Jawad, Omar Khadr and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul.

Thursday’s hearing in Afghan national Mohammed Jawad’s case brought stunning testimony on serious abuse he suffered at Bagram Air Base in Afghanistan as a teenager, as well as military psychologists’ role in crafting abusive interrogation methods for use on Jawad and other prisoners at Guantánamo Bay.

Last night on Daily Kos, Meteor Blades broke a significant piece of news: on August 14, Lt. Colonel Diane Zierhoffer, a U.S. Army psychologist who ordered illegal torture techniques -- sleep deprivation and isolation -- on a juvenile detained at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, invoked her right to avoid compulsory self-incrimination, refusing to testify in the case of Mohammad Jawad.

Lt. Colonel Zierhoffer, PhD, had been called as a witness before the National Military Commission trial by defense attorney David Frakt, an Air Force Reserves Major. She had been slated to testify yesterday in a hearing on his motion to dismiss the case, based upon alleged gross government misconduct in torturing Jawad.

Dr. Zierhoffer's testimony would have been the first publicly known occasion that a member of the Behavioral Science Consultation Team (BSCT) had been called to testify in a detainee hearing.

By Jennifer Turner, Human Rights Researcher, ACLU Human Rights Program. Jennifer is in Guantánamo for the pre-trial hearings of Mohammed Jawad, Omar Khadr and Ali Hamza al-Bahlul.

Two hearings on Wednesday concerned the cases of two of the youngest prisoners of Guantánamo Bay, Omar Khadr and Mohammed Jawad, who were both teenagers when they were captured by U.S. forces.

Disclaimer: This diary doesn't present any new information that the wonderful report by MeteorBlades didn't already supply.

What I am providing is an idea that the upcoming APA Annual Conferencegives an opportunity to speak up about it. There will be a group of psychologist dissidents at the conference, speaking up about the APA's stance on condoning the presence of psychologists for use in torture at Guantanamo, and they need our help.

If you want to stop medical and scientific institutions from being further usurped by the backwards policies of the Bush administration, please join me in emailing the APA, telling them not to condone Bush's torture.

Unlike the people in Stalin’s Soviet Union, no U.S. official risked disappearing into the prison for dissent. Senior State Department and Defense Department official, field commanders, intelligence and FBI officers, and frontline soldiers dissented. They were usually ignored. A few were threatened with administrative sanctions; a few were reassigned; a few requested reassignment. The possibility of dissent makes the silence and complicity of senior and frontline medical personnel in the abuse and neglect of prisoners that much more inexplicable and inexcusable.         – Dr. Steven H. Miles, M.D., Oath Betrayed: Torture, Medical Complicity, and the War on Terror

Despite Dr. Miles’s book, despite Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side, despite reports such as the Physicians for Human Rights' Broken Laws, Broken Lives: Medical Evidence of US Torture and its Impact, Americans still don't have anywhere near a full picture of what happened after the Cheney-Bush administration decided to spit on the Geneva Conventions, redefine and fine-tune torture and treat human beings like the inferior creatures it thought them to be.

What we do know is horrible enough. Most horrible of all is knowing that medical personnel and psychologists violated the most basic ethics of their professions – Do No Harm – by participating in and helping to design "enhanced" interrogations designed to break prisoners. Some did break. Some were killed. This systematic torture focused on sensory and sleep deprivation, overstimulation, and dependency creation. Massive amounts of pain and fear were also included. For their part, psychologists "reverse-engineered" the military's Survival, Evasion, Resistance, Escape (SERE) program – designed to help American soldiers and marines resist torture – as a means to teach interrogators how to employ torture against captives.  

Let me repeat that. Training established to help American prisoners of war cope with, or at least anticipate, their captors' efforts to break them down was "reverse-engineered" as a means to break down prisoners at Guantánamo and "black sites" run by the CIA or military intelligence operations in Europe, Asia, North Africa and the island of Diego Garcia in the Indian Ocean.

Talk about becoming the enemy.

We also know that, even after the supposed banning of some measures that had been previously approved by the Secretary of Defense, these techniques continued at the detention center at Guantánamo Bay Naval Base, and probably other prisons, even while the Inspector General was putting a seal of approval on the whole affair.

As Josh White wrote in the Washington Post last Friday:

At least 17 detainees held at Guantanamo Bay were subjected to a program that moved them repeatedly from cell to cell to cause sleep deprivation and disorientation as punishment and to soften detainees for subsequent interrogation, according to U.S. military documents.

Defense Department investigations of abuse had previously revealed that the program was used in a limited manner and only on high-value detainees, but the documents indicate that the program was far more widespread and that the technique was still used months after it was banned at the facility in March 2004. Detainees were moved dozens of times in just days and sometimes more than a hundred times over a two-week period.

Military police logs for cell blocks at Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, show that guards used the program -- dubbed the "frequent flyer" program in official documents -- on numerous detainees and noted the program in their 2003 and 2004 records. The logs, reviewed by The Washington Post, also indicate that the frequent cell movements took place on the same days a Navy admiral was visiting Guantanamo to assess possible detainee abuses.

The Defense Department claims the program stopped in 2004. A spokesperson told White that all prisoners are treated humanely.

Cough, cough.

"Frequent flyers." Think about the kind of mentality that not only designs torture methods but turns them into a joke.

Twenty-four-year-old Mohammed Jawad, who will soon go on trial by military tribunal for trying to kill U.S. forces in Afghanistan with a grenade, has sought to have all the charges against him dropped because of abuse he suffered, including that caused by frequent moves.

Air Force Maj. David Frakt, Jawad's lawyer, said the newly revealed records demonstrate that:

"...no one actually knows the full scope of the abuses at Guantanamo" and that "all of these allegedly comprehensive investigations were whitewashes."

"This is only the tip of the iceberg," Frakt said. "This program was approved at the highest levels. ... It suggests that people had simply lost their ability to distinguish right from wrong."

With all due respect to the major, that puts the best face on it. Because among those engaged in vetting, monitoring and carrying out this program approved at the highest levels were some of the very people we count on to help us distinguish right from wrong. In some cases, they evaluated the status of a prisoner and informed interrogators that he was good for another round or two of "questioning."

This must stop, wrote psychoanalyst Stephen Soldz in a Sunday Boston Globe Op-Ed, Ending the psychological mind games on detainees:

Psychologists have been identified as key figures in the design and conduct of abuses against detainees in US custody at Guantanamo, the CIA's secret "black sites," and in Iraq and Afghanistan. Psychologists should not be taking part in such practices.

Yet a steady stream of revelations from government documents, journalistic reports, and congressional hearings has revealed that psychologists designed the CIA's "enhanced interrogation" techniques – which included locking prisoners in tiny cages in the fetal position, throwing them against the wall head first, prolonged nakedness, sexual humiliation, and waterboarding.

Jane Mayer ... reports that the central idea was the psychological concept of "learned helplessness." Individuals are denied all control over their world, lose their will and become totally dependent upon their captors.

What angers Soldz and hundreds of other professional psychologists and psychoanalysts is that their organization, the American Psychological Association, has taken an official position that the presence of psychologists makes detainees safer at interrogations. That view, Soldz declares every chance he gets, is ludicrous. In fact, the policy enables the torturers.

At the Chronicle of Higher Education, David Glenn writes that, according to Mayer's book:

...Martin E.P. Seligman, a professor of psychology at the University of Pennsylvania and a former president of the psychology association, accepted a CIA invitation to lecture at a naval training center about his theories of  "learned helplessness."

Mr. Seligman's widely respected research suggests that when people and animals are traumatized at random intervals, they tend to give up: They stop seeking to rationally help themselves, and they stop responding to ordinary incentives.

Mr. Seligman insists that his 2002 lecture was intended only to help train U.S. soldiers to resist torture if they are captured. But in his 50-person audience that day were Bruce Jessen and James Elmer Mitchell, psychologists who operate a consulting firm that helped the CIA develop interrogation techniques that some critics have called abusive. According to Ms. Mayer's book, Mr. Mitchell has long been fascinated by learned-helplessness theory. (Through a lawyer, Mr. Mitchell denied to Ms. Mayer that his CIA interrogation techniques were inspired by Mr. Seligman's work.)

Few people in the psychology association believe that Mr. Seligman consciously assisted in the development of detainee abuses. But many say that the association needs to make a more thorough public accounting of how the work of Mr. Seligman and other prominent members may have been misused by government agencies.

Soldz, and four other authors addressed the Seligman matter at some length in the July 23 issue of Dissident Voice:

This history, along with the current, well-documented authorizations for detainee abuse, should have provided sufficient warning to APA leaders and to individual psychologists about the moral risks in aiding the national security apparatus, especially under the present U.S. administration. But the APA has not taken the lead in helping psychologists confront these dangerous ethical situations. To the contrary, the APA has been insensitive to the use of psychological techniques in torture and to the role of psychologists in aiding that torture. This insensitivity itself has shocked many psychologists here and abroad.

So, for the second year in a row, the issue of torture and illegal detention will be a hot one at the APA's annual convention, which begins Thursday in Boston. Soldz will be on hand for a protest. In addition to rejecting the APA's position on torture and interrogations, the protesters will be backing the candidacy of Dr. Steven Reisner for the presidency of the organization as well as the "Aye" vote on a referendum that would reinforce the first principle of the APA ethics code: "Psychologists strive to benefit those with whom they work and take care to do no harm."

Reisner, a psychoanalyst, is a senior faculty member and supervisor at the International Trauma Studies Program, an adjunct professor of Psychology and Education at Columbia University, and a consultant to the United Nations on stress and trauma. He is a leader of Psychologists for an Ethical Psychology, and, with Soldz and others, a leading critic of the APA's position. In April, the mail-in nominating procedure for the APA presidency gave Reisner the most votes (more than 30%) of any of the five candidates who will compete with each other for the post in October,

The mail-in referendum has tough opposition. It states:

Be it resolved that psychologists may not work in settings where persons are held outside of, or in violation of, either International Law (e.g., the UN Convention Against Torture and the Geneva  Conventions) or the US Constitution (where appropriate), unless they are working directly for the persons being detained or for an independent third party working to protect human rights.

You can read the entire resolution with all its whereases, pro and con statements and pro and con rebuttals here.

For the past few years, the APA bureaucracy and a good piece of the membership has played a game of on-the-one-hand/on-the-other-hand regarding the role of psychologists and psychoanalysts in the kinds of interrogations brought to us by Donald Rumsfeld and other outlaws in the current administration.

There's just one problem with the APA's hemming and hawing approach: Torture is not a nuanced issue.

    Progressives have long charged that Bush's judicial appointments have been in part intended to ensure that the independence of the judicial branch in our government is modified to limit their independence to matters not of concern to the Republican party and the people who appoint them.  Unfortunately, a clear example of that has now appeared, reported in the New York Times here  in respect of the hundreds of immigrant workers at a meatpacking plant in Iowa
  The strange speed with which the Iowa Federal court dealt with hundreds of cases within four days was shocking enough when it happened, but now, unfortunately we hear how it was done. Let this be a lesson to the rest of us.

On Thursday the jurors in Salim Hamdan's military tribunal at Guantanamo deliberated for only one hour before agreeing on a sentence of just 66 months. They'd already determined that the judge, Capt. Keith Allred, planned to count Hamdan's incarceration as time served. So the "stunningly light sentence" was a rebuke of the Bush administration on several levels simultaneously. The jury in effect sentenced Hamdan to a prison term for the duration of the Bush administration.

It's hard to believe that was accidental. The military prosecutors had asked for a sentence of 30 years to life - even after failing to get a conviction for the most serious charges leveled against Hamdan. It looks like the 6 senior officers of the jury decided to send a carefully calculated message: By making Hamdan's punishment co-terminous with Bush's presidency, the jurors implied that the brutal and lawless system at Guantanamo is an artifact of this administration and should not outlive it.

There's an obvious parallel from another nightmarish era of civil liberties abuses: the delay in releasing Eugene Debs and other war protestors until after the expiry of the Wilson administration, which had wrongly imprisoned the men during WWI and held them until the bitter end. A vindictive Woodrow Wilson was never going to free Debs and the rest, and it required a new administration to do the decent thing. The Debs case is a landmark of presidential abuse of power during time of war.

The war crimes charges against Hamdan looked almost as overblown, given that the jury found he took no part in Bin Laden's terrorist conspiracies. In fact, the jurors had secret testimony indicating that Hamdan had tried to help his captors to catch Bin Laden.

Why the jury decided on the short sentence wasn't clear. But sources familiar with secret testimony for the defense given July 31 said the information revealed in that testimony likely angered the jurors.

Two senior Army Special Forces officers told a closed session of the trial of an "opportunity" that Hamdan had offered them in Afghanistan in the first weeks after his Nov. 24, 2001, capture. That chance was "squandered" by the government, Navy Lt. Cmdr. Brian Mizer, a defense lawyer, said in his closing argument before Wednesday's verdict.

Speculation has focused on a blown opportunity to capture bin Laden, as Hamdan might have known his whereabouts.

What's clear in any case is that the military jury decided to deliver a 'slap in the face' to the Bush administration and its detention policies.

One final point: The Bush administration via the Pentagon has implied that it will continue to hold Gitmo prisoners no matter what the verdicts of the tribunals. Even Judge Allred didn't know whether Hamdan would be released after he serves out his term. So the sentence, which runs through late December, also puts Bush on the spot during the last few weeks of his rule. He has the chance, if he chooses to take it, to demonstrate once again for posterity that he fits the Wilsonian mold of the vindictive, embittered president. After that, though, his wishes will suddenly stop mattering any longer.

By Suzanne Ito, Web Producer, ACLU

This morning Ben Wizner, staff attorney for the ACLU's  National Security Project, who's been in Guantánamo for Salim Hamdan's historic trial under the unconstitutional military commission system, podcasted his observations on Hamdan's sentence. On Wednesday, the jury convicted Hamdan of material support for terrorism, and yesterday, after the prosecution requested a 30-years-to-life sentence, the jury delivered a sentence  of 66 months, including time served, to Hamdan. That means Hamdan's sentence will technically be over in less than five months.

Well, after the punditry gave its, "Of course they are going to find him guilty, statements, the military jury pulled the old switcheroo!

A military jury gave Osama bin Laden's driver a stunningly lenient sentence on Thursday, making him eligible for release in just five months despite the prosecutors' request for a sentence tough enough to frighten terrorists around the globe.

Salim Hamdan's sentence of 5 1/2 years, including five years and a month already served at Guantanamo Bay, fell far short of the 30 years to life that prosecutors wanted. It now goes for mandatory review to a Pentagon official who can shorten the sentence but not extend it.

A little more below.Huff Post Article

Salim Hamdan was sentenced to 5 1/2 years in prison, significantly less than prosecutors requested:

Earlier Thursday, during his sentencing hearing, Hamdan told a military court that he never suspected bin Laden was a terrorist until after the September 11, 2001, attacks.

Prosecutors weren't buying his story and recommended he be sent to prison for 30 years to life.

Hamdan, speaking through a translator, gave the unsworn testimony one day after six officers convicted him of providing material support to al Qaeda but cleared him of terrorism conspiracy charges.

He will be eligible for release in 6 months:

Hamdan has been imprisoned at Guantanamo Bay since 2002. The judge has given him credit for five years of prison time.

By Ben Wizner, Staff Attorney for the ACLU's National Security  Project. Ben is in Guantánamo for the trial of Salim Ahmed Hamdan.

There’s been little time for blogging, but then there’s been less need — Hamdan is front-page news worldwide today, and you can read excellent accounts of Wednesday’s remarkable proceedings here, here, and here.

Every week I read out of the way, oddly related stories that remind me what an abject barbecue republic America has become under young Mr. Bush's stewardship.  Here are a few of the latest ones.

First up is an item that apparently only James Gordon Meek of the New York Daily News and MSNBC's Keith Olbermann cared enough about to report.  On August 2 Meek wrote "In the immediate aftermath of the 2001 anthrax attacks, White House officials repeatedly pressed FBI Director Robert Mueller to prove it was a second-wave assault by Al Qaeda, but investigators ruled that out."

Osama bin Laden's personal driver and bodyguard, who made the magisterial sum of $200 per month, 34-year-old Salim Ahmed Hamdan, who was held years without charges at Guantanamo Naval Base prison, has just been found guilty of lesser charges in the first of a series of planned "military commission" trials by the Bush Administration. Comprehensive news coverage of the Hamdan trial can be found at the Miami Herald.

Hamdan was found not guilty on two counts of conspiracy to foment terrorism in league with Al Qaeda. He was found guilty on five of eight charges of providing material support to terrorists. He has yet to be sentenced, and faces possible life imprisonment. In any case, the Bush Administration has already said that whatever the verdict or sentence, no "enemy combatant" will be released until the "war on terror" is over, i.e., until hell freezes over.