Francisco Ayala García-Duarte (16 March 1906 – 3 November 2009) was a Spanish writer and teacher. Born in Granada, at the age of nineteen he published his first novel, Tragicomedia de un hombre sin espíritu.
At the start of the Spanish Civil War, Ayala was out of the country. He returned for a brief time, later serving as secretary of the Spanish Republic’s legation in Prague. After the war he moved to Argentina where he lived between 1939 and 1950. There he taught sociology while continuing to publish works of fiction, literary criticism and sociology, notably a three-volume Tratado de la sociología (1947.) …
Many of his writings deal with the topics of power and abuse of power. In general he has not directly written about the war in Spain, but examines it instead through other periods of history.
He was awarded the Cervantes Prize, the top literary prize in the Spanish-speaking world, in 1991 and seven years later the Prince of Asturias Prize for literature, the Spanish equivalent of the Nobel Prize. …
Ayala went into exile at the end of Spain’s 1936-39 civil war as right-wing General Francisco Franco consolidated power, and he only permanently returned to the country in 1980, five years after the dictator’s death.
This certainly lines up with what we know about human nature, especially cognitive dissonance: “I did it, therefore it must have been right and good.” And now, a new study out of Harvard (PDF) shows — via a clever experiment — that complicity in torture makes one more likely to believe that a torture victim is guilty. What’s more, the more pain the victim feels, the more the complicit believe he or she is guilty.
Here, from ScienceDaily, is how the experiment was conducted:
The study included 78 participants: half met the woman who was apparently tortured (actually a confederate of the experimenters who was, of course, not harmed at all), and half did not. Participants were told that the study was about moral behavior, and that the woman may have cheated by taking more money than she deserved. The experimenter suggested that a stressful situation might make a guilty person confess, so participants listened for a confession over a hidden intercom as she was subjected to the sham “torture.”
The confederate did not admit to cheating but reacted to having her hand submerged in ice water with either indifference or with whimpering and pleading. Participants who had met her rated her as more guilty the more she suffered. Those who did not meet her rated her as more guilty when she felt less pain.
“Those who feel complicit with the torture have a need to justify the torture, and so link the victim’s pain to blame,” the piece quotes Kurt Gray, a graduate student in psychology and the lead author of the study, as saying. “On the other hand, those distant from torture have no need to justify it and so can sympathize with the suffering of the victim, linking pain to innocence.” …
What’s closer to settled, however, is how torture affects the torturer. And, no, I’m not talking about how it morally corrupts one’s soul. I’m talking about how it biases the way we look at the information that comes from torture. As I discussed in this post, another problem with torture is the incentives it creates for tortured and torturer. Basically, it serves both for the person being tortured to just say something, anything, so that the torture can stop — because, outside of true sadists, the torturer finds torturing very unpleasant and will take any excuse to not have to keep doing it.
This study out of Harvard just emphasizes the problems for those who would set out to torture. Not only are they predisposed to believe whatever a torture victim says, they’re also — by virtue of their complicity in another human being’s suffering — more likely to assume that person is guilty. Which makes the prospects of gaining actionable and accurate intelligence from torture all that more dim.
The American public could learn more about George W. Bush and Dick Cheney’s torture and rendition policies on Friday if the Obama administration follows through on a promise to review a number of internal Bush administration documents. Earlier this month, the administration vowed to make its “best efforts” to process some 224 documents by October 30 to determine what can be publicly released. Government lawyers acknowledged last month that these documents are potentially responsive to a years-old ACLU Freedom of Information Act request for information relating to the death, treatment, and rendition of detainees: here.
On October 3, 2009, Fundashon Rehabilitashon Tula hosted a symposium with a dual purpose. The first objective was to establish a resolution to rehabilitate Tula. The second aim was to declare Tula a national hero of the Curaçao community.
Tula was a slave who on the Monday morning of August 17, 1795 organized a group of fellow slaves at the Kenepa plantation who resolved not to work as slaves anymore. The rebellion lasted for more than a month, but in the end the colonial forces crushed the revolt. Tula was interrogated and tortured, convicted and executed all for demanding freedom for himself and his people.
“In recent years, it has increasingly become clear that Dutch activities in this Atlantic world [of trans-Atlantic slave trade etc.] were of far greater [economic] significance [for the Dutch Republic in 1680-1795] than historians hitherto assumed”: here.
According to the Daily Mail, the only known film footage of Anne Frank has been released for the first time to a worldwide audience. This is not entirely true. I watched this video a few years ago when it was included in a documentary about the tragic diarist. Nonetheless, it is touching.
Agency chiefs faced a Monday deadline to turn over more papers.
But they failed to do so, telling the federal judge in charge of the case the case that, if dozens of remaining documents are made public, it would “degrade the government’s ability to effectively question terrorist detainees and elicit information necessary to protect the American people.”
ACLU National Security Project director Jameel Jaffer observed that the CIA justification for withholding the documents “is entirely incompatible with the Obama administration’s stated commitment to ending torture and restoring governmental transparency.
“On the one hand, President Obama has publicly recognised that torture undermines the rule of law and America’s standing in the world, but on the other, the CIA continues to argue in court that it cannot disclose information about its torture techniques.”
Mr Jaffer said that the CIA arguments “are utterly disconnected from the Obama administration’s stated positions.”
In its filing, the CIA also argued that the information available to the public about the torture programme should be limited to its “historical context and legal underpinnings.”
However, the government has already released several documents that provide more than abstract detail about the interrogations.
ACLU National Security Project legal expert Alex Abdo said: “Given the vast amount of evidence that the US torture programme was widespread and systemic, it’s disappointing that the government continues to withhold these vital documents that would fill in the remaining gaps in the public record.”
Mr Abdo said that the Obama administration has to “fulfil its commitment to transparency.”
In over 300 pages crammed full of facts, figures, incriminating and self-incriminating quotes, Swanson’s Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union makes the following case: Bush-Cheney and their cohorts are guilty of a power grab which has inflicted near mortal wounds on the Constitution; Obama has not done nearly enough to repair the damage; Congress has collapsed, and even the Supreme Court could use some fixing up: here.
CIA doctors face human experimentation claims: here.
Physicians for Human Rights charges in a new report that medical professionals attached to the CIA participated in the torture of “terror suspects” and used prisoners as human research subjects: here.
AMNESTY declared on Wednesday that US President Barack Obama must do more to shake off the legacy of torture, impunity and unlawful detention he inherited from the previous US administration: here.
Shocking evidence has emerged that CIA medical personnel were centrally involved in torture at US detention sites such as Guantanamo: here.
A report in the New York Times on August 13 confirms that the CIA planned and organized secret prisons from the German city of Frankfurt/Main. At least three secret prisons were administered by the CIA branch office in Frankfurt beginning in 2003.
The prisons run from Frankfurt included two that were located respectively in the Romanian capital of Bucharest and a remote part of Morocco. A third is alleged to have been in the Polish town of Kiejkuty, near the Szymany airport. A fourth prison was located in Lithuania.
The secret prisons were used to extort information from prisoners using methods of torture that would not have been possible in the US. The director of the Frankfurt CIA branch office at that time, Kyle D. Foggo, told the Times that these measures were organized from Frankfurt because “it was too sensitive to be handled by headquarters.”
In September 2006, then US president George W. Bush admitted the existence of secret prisons for the first time. These torture prisons were used to systematically subject those deemed to be terrorist suspects to sleep deprivation, waterboarding and beatings in order to obtain information or extort confessions.
British legal action charity Reprieve has condemned a stealth announcement by the Obama administration that the abduction and torture of suspects will continue under its “extraordinary renditions” programme: here.
Doctors had ‘central role’ in CIA abuse: rights group: here.
Doctors, nurses, psychologists, and other health care professionals complicit in the US torture program should be subject to an independent investigation, and those found to have violated professional ethics or the law should be prosecuted and/or lose their license and professional society memberships. That sentiment, from the nonprofit Physicians for Human Rights (PHR), may well mark the first time a doctors’ group has demanded true accountability of its professional peers: here.
C.I.A. Resists Disclosure of Records on Detention: here.
Israel currently has a great many professors of law and business administration, but very few professors of Egyptology. The few students who want to learn about hieroglyphics or the history of Pharaonic Egypt are often forced to make do with the single lecturer, at most, who specializes in this field at each university.
Because of the lack of students and faculty positions, Egyptology, Assyriology, classics and African studies are on the verge of disappearing from the world of academia here.
This week, the nation’s universities announced a new initiative aimed at enabling “unpopular” fields of study to continue to exist in an era of budget cuts: four joint programs in which students will take classes from lecturers at several different universities.
Thus an Egyptology student would spend one semester, or one day a week, at Tel Aviv university, and the next he would go to Haifa University or the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The four programs are in ancient Near East languages and culture, Africa studies, Latin in the Middle Ages, and Jewish culture in the ancient world.
Crisis Intervention of Houston received 60 calls from people with financial problems in September, 2007 as compared with 292 in June, 2009.
Suicides in Houston increased by more than 25% between 2006 and 2008, according to the article based on records from the medical examiner’s office.
These needless suicides parallel the suicides which occurred in the 20s and 30s following the stock market crash and subsequent massive unemployment.
It should be pointed out that Texas Governor Rick Perry recently declined to accept federal money to boost the Unemployment Insurance in this state available to people who have lost their jobs.
The Chronicle article quotes Dr. Alicia Vittone, assistant professor of psychiatry at the University of Texas Medical School at Houston and director of the Mental Sciences Institutes Adult Outpatient Clinic, as saying, “We are seeing lots of patients who have worsening symptoms because of the economy. Mental illnesses worsen during economic crises, and so do addiction illnesses.”
The article examines the case of Gloria Veedell of Houston who lost her husband of 36 years and her stepson to suicide just two weeks apart. Her 71-year old husband was an on-site salesman for a home builder who was mourning the death of his son. He was experiencing extreme stress at work when he fatally shot himself. Mrs. Veedell blames her husband’s death “100 percent” on the economy. He had worked in the housing sales industry for 30 years and wrote a book in 2007 “Birth of a salesman: From stitches to sticks and bricks.”
Mental health professionals know the importance of economic well being to many people’s sense of self-worth. It is really tragic when people see themselves as isolated individuals disconnected from the community. They lose sight of the fact that their personal financial crisis is interconnected to the overall economic crisis. As a result, they view themselves as failures when in fact it is the economic system that has failed them.
Indeed, I have seen a dramatic increase in people seeking services in my practice who are experiencing personal financial crises as a result of layoffs and lack of a social safety net.
Some people have recognized that these casualties of the class struggle should not have to die in vain. Capitalism can be lethal to working people. Deaths of workers occur due to poor safety standards at work, suicides as a response to personal financial crisis and lack of the availability of mental health care. Health care reform will help, but massive educational efforts are needed so that people gain a new perspective.
Trade unionists are blaming a brutal management culture at communications giant France Telecom for a spate of suicide attempts by workers: here.
US researchers have released a study that links air pollution exposure before birth to lower IQ scores in childhood, indicating that smog may harm the developing brain.
The evidence, which was published in the August edition of US journal Paediatrics, emerged in a study of 249 children of New York City women who wore backpack air monitors for 48 hours during the last few months of pregnancy.
They lived in mostly low-income communities in northern Manhattan and the South Bronx and had varying levels of exposure to typical kinds of urban air pollution, mostly from car, bus and lorry fumes.
At age five, before starting school, the children were given IQ tests.
Those exposed to the most pollution before birth scored on average four to five points lower than children with less exposure.
Frederica Perera, the study’s lead author and director of the Columbia Centre for Children’s Environmental Health, emphasised that researchers had taken into account other factors that could influence IQ, including second-hand smoke exposure, the home-learning environment and air-pollution exposure after birth and still found a strong influence from prenatal exposure.
Patrick Breysse, an environmental health specialist at Johns Hopkins school of public health, stressed that future research is needed to confirm the new results.
But Mr Breysse said that the findings suggest exposure to air pollution before birth could have the same harmful effects on the developing brain as exposure to lead.
From Wikipedia:
