Historical quotes of the day – Ours!

“Persian oil is yours. We share the oil of Iraq and Kuwait. As for Saudi Arabian oil, it’s ours.”

– FDR to Lord Halifax, 1944, quoted in Perry Anderson, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, Chapter 5, note 9

“Abadan and Suez are important to the local peoples only in terms of their amour propre… To us, some of these things are important in a much more serious sense, and for reasons that today are sounder and better and more defensible than they ever were in history. To retain these facilities and positions we can use today only one thing: military strength, backed by the resolution and courage to use it.”

– George Kennan to Secretary of State Dean Acheson, 1952, quoted in Perry Anderson, American Foreign Policy and Its Thinkers, Chapter 5, note 10

Many killed and wounded in bombings of peace march in Ankara

A deadly attack on a leftwing, Kurdish rally for peace and justice.

Quote of the day – Oh, FFS

“‘Kissinger’s official biographer’, writes the man Kissinger first asked to be his official biographer, ‘certainly gives the reader enough evidence to conclude that Henry Kissinger is one of the greatest Americans in the history of the republic,…’”

[Source]

From an unofficial biography.

(They’re all men, by the way: neoliberal men, neoconservative men, imperialist men, biographical men, Islamist men, secular-nationalist men, ambitious men, historiographical men, critical men, theoretical men, anti-imperialist men,... It’s a regular club.)

Jarabulus

Kurdish forces hope by the end of the year to take Jarabulus, cutting off ISIS’ only remaining border crossing with Turkey and uniting Rojava. They seem appropriately wary of the US government.

Chomsky Q&A at the New School

The transcript is here. Some highlights:

…The major center of radical Islam, extremist radical Islam, is Saudi Arabia, unquestionably. They are the source of the Wahhabization of the region, which Patrick Cockburn points out is one of the major developments of the modern era. Who’s the main supporter of Saudi Arabia? You are. You know, that’s where your tax dollars go. It’s been for a long time. Right now tens of billions of dollars of arms being sent under Obama, but it goes way back.

…The most extreme and interesting example [of the US government supporting a secular state in the Middle East] is Saddam Hussein, who was greatly loved by the Reagan administration and by the Bush I administration. I could give you the details, but they were so supportive of Saddam Hussein that he was even given a gift that otherwise only Israel has been granted, no other country. He was permitted to attack a U.S. naval vessel, killing a couple of dozen American sailors, and to get away with it with just a tap on the wrist. Israel had done the same thing in 1967. Saddam Hussein did it in 1987. And the friendship for Saddam Hussein was so enormous that he was granted that right. And that was a secular state. In fact, George Bush number one even invited Iraqi nuclear engineers to the United States for advanced training in nuclear weapons production. That’s a pretty supportive relationship. So there are cases where the United States has supported secular Islam, but typically it’s radical Islam that has been the beneficiary of U.S. support, like Britain before it.

…The only conceivable hope for some resolution of this horrendous crisis [in Syria], which is totally destroying the country, is the kind of negotiated settlement that was worked on by serious negotiators, like Lakhdar Brahimi, an international negotiator, very respectable, sensible. And the main idea, which—shared by any analyst with a grey cell functioning, is some kind of negotiated settlement which will involve the Assad government, like it or not, and involve the opposition elements, like it or not. There can’t be negotiations that don’t involve the parties that are fighting. That’s pretty obvious, just as South African negotiations had to involve the leadership of the apartheid state. There’s no other way. They can’t have other negotiations. It’s perfectly obvious that the Assad government is not going to enter into negotiations that are based on the condition that it commits suicide. If that’s the condition, they’re just going to keep destroying the country. That unfortunately is the—has been the U.S. position of the negotiations. U.S. and its allies have demanded that negotiations be based on the precondition that the Assad government will not survive. It’s a horrible government, and I’d like it not to survive, but that’s a prescription for destroying Syria, because it’s not going to enter into negotiations on those terms.

…I think what’s actually happened is that during the whole so-called neoliberal period, last generation, both political parties have drifted to the right. Today’s Democrats are what used to be called moderate Republicans. The Republicans have just drifted off the spectrum. They’re so committed to extreme wealth and power that they cannot get votes, can’t get votes by presenting those positions. So what has happened is that they’ve mobilized sectors of the population that have been around for a long time. It is a pretty exceptional country in many ways. One is it’s extremely religious. It’s one of the most extreme fundamentalist countries in the world. And by now, I suspect the majority of the base of the Republican Party is evangelical Christians, extremists, not—they’re a mixture, but these are the extremist ones, nativists who are afraid that, you know, ‘they are taking our white Anglo-Saxon country away from us’, people who have to have guns when they go into Starbucks because, who knows, they might get killed by an Islamic terrorist and so on. I mean, all of that is part of the country, and it goes back to colonial days. There are real roots to it. But these have not been an organized political force in the past. They are now. That’s the base of the Republican Party. And you see it in the primaries. So, yeah, Trump is maybe comic relief, but it’s just a—it’s not that different from the mainstream, which I think is more important.

…The United States did not—it was a—it may have been—it was probably the richest country in the world back in the early 19th century, but not the most powerful country. Britain was the most powerful. France was a powerful country. And that changed over the years, especially with the First World War and finally with the Second World War. So, exceptionalism has greatly expanded as power expanded. And I say again that this exceptionalism was also true of other great powers during their day of imperial power and domination.

…Israel is now - does play a major role - small country, but good high-tech industry, and it plays a major role in repression and aggression. It’s developed - the Israeli arms fairs, where they sell their arms, they advertise, correctly, that they have developed advanced means of repression and control, and that the arms that they’re displaying are battlefield-tested, namely against the Palestinians. So they’ve refined the techniques of control. And they contribute to that all over the place—in Central America, even in the United States. They’re providing advice on how to bar Honduran immigrants, say, from coming to the United States. They help train police and so on, many examples.

…One of the major doctrines of international affairs, which doesn’t appear in the literature, is the Mafia doctrine. International affairs are run like the—very much like the Mafia. The godfather does not tolerate disobedience. It’s much too dangerous. So, if some small storekeeper somewhere, say, doesn’t pay protection money, the don doesn’t accept it. You send their goons to beat him to a pulp, even if you don’t need the money, because others might get the idea, then things might start to erode. That is a dominant principle of international affairs. In fact, that was the reason for the 1953 coup [in Iran, orchestrated by the CIA], when you look back. And it’s also the reason why—for U.S. hostility to Iran, which is extreme. I mentioned the support for Saddam Hussein. That was an attack on Iran, and a serious one. But they defied orders. They overthrew a U.S.-imposed tyrant. They thumbed their nose at the United States. And you don’t get away with that.

…Arthur Schlesinger, Kennedy’s Latin American adviser, reported to him the report of his Latin American mission, said the problem is the Castro idea of taking matters into your own hands, which appeals to others in the hemisphere where people suffer similar repression, and you can’t let that idea spread.

His assertion that in Syria the US government “has taken a somewhat hands-off position, except that it’s supporting its allies” is an understatement. I hope to write more about this soon, but see, for example, this revealing document, here, and here.

Needless to say, they’re not sincere.

“If Australia was sincere about fighting ISIS, it would end the criminalisation of the PKK and other laws that have frustrated attempts at practical solidarity with the democratic resistance to ISIS. The embargo preventing the YPG/J or PKK obtaining heavy weapons would be lifted and Turkish state support for ISIS would be exposed and opposed.”

- Tony Iltis, “The real reason Tony Abbott wants to bomb Syria”

Quote of the day

“As neoliberalism submits all spheres of life to economization, the effect is not simply to narrow the functions of state and citizen or to enlarge the sphere of economically defined freedom at the expense of common investment in public life and public goods. Rather, it is to attenuate radically the exercise of freedom in the social and political spheres. This is the central paradox, perhaps even the central ruse, of neoliberal governance: the neoliberal revolution takes place in the name of freedom – free markets, free countries, free men – but tears up freedom’s grounding in sovereignty for states and subjects alike.”

- Wendy Brown, Undoing the Demos: Neoliberalism’s Stealth Revolution (2015), p. 108

An illustration – the “liberation” of Iraq by the invading and occupying force, as described by Mark Neocleous in Critique of Security (pp. 146-147):

These [corporate-friendly and corrupt] practices are clearly due to the need to get the Iraqi people ready for a new life organised by and for capital, an Iraq which, in Rumsfeld’s words, ‘provides opportunities for its people through a market economy’, following the policy developed by the US Agency for International Development under advice from BearingPoint (formerly KPMG), in their report ‘Stimulating Economic Recovery, Reform and Sustained Growth in Iraq’ (February 2003) specifying a liberalisation of the Iraqi economy. …But this liberalisation of Iraq was to be conducted under a decidedly dictatorial political order. So from May 2003, when Iraq was declared open for business, to June 2004, when the Coalition Provisional Authority (CPA) was dissolved, the new authoritarian liberalism saw the introduction of 100 Orders fundamentally altering Iraqi law in order to implement a capitalist economic model. After first firing more than half a million employees of the 190 state-owned companies (Orders 1 and 2) and passing an Executive Order granting non-Iraqi companies (that is, American companies) immunity from prosecution for any acts undertaken in relation to oil exploration, production or sale, a raft of other Orders was set in place including a trade-liberalisation policy removing all protective barriers (Order 12), a flat-tax policy (Order 37), the opening of the Iraqi banking sector to foreign ownership (Order 4), the rewriting of the patent, trademark and copyright laws to ensure access to foreign producers (Orders 80, 81 and 83) and, most importantly, the selling off of all of Iraq’s state-owned enterprises (Order 39). The only laws left intact were the previous regime’s limitations on labour rights and trade union membership. All these Orders were then upheld with the passage of the constitution in October 2005, Article 25 of which requires that the State guarantee the reform of the Iraqi economy according to ‘modern economic principles’ and ensures the ‘development of the private sector’. A commitment to capitalism is now a constitutional requirement.

Sweet freedom.

Quote of the day

“What’s clear is that Isis and its monstrosities won’t be defeated by the same powers that brought it to Iraq and Syria in the first place, or whose open and covert war-making has fostered it in the years since. Endless western military interventions in the Middle East have brought only destruction and division. It’s the people of the region who can cure this disease – not those who incubated the virus.”

- Seumas Milne

Yanar Mohammed on Democracy Now!

“I see only a secular answer could be a real solution. It cannot be done in a short time. It will take its time, but it’s the only savior for all the people of Iraq—the religious, the Muslims, the Sunni, the Shia, the Christians, the Yazidis. Only a secular government and constitution...can save everybody.”

Playing along

The Bush administration wanted to invade and occupy Iraq, so they lied. The Obama administration wanted to move aggressively against the democratically elected government of Venezuela, so they made the outlandish claim of a national emergency due to the “unusual and extraordinary” threat posed by Venezuela to US national security.

As this latest episode shows, they no longer even think they have to pretend to be telling the truth – the actual language of the laws is a meaningless formality. Can’t take certain measures against another government unless they’re a real threat? No problem. Just declare them a threat, reality and honesty be damned. “We wanted to do something that’s only permitted under certain conditions, so we lied about the existence of those conditions” is now put forward as a legitimate justification. And the US media and public should be ready to play along. I mean, acquiescing to the flagrant subversion of laws meant to check government power and prevent its abuse couldn’t possibly have negative consequences for people in the US.

UPDATED TO ADD: Jim Naureckas at FAIR just posted about the embarrassing WaPo article I linked to above, reading it in light of the paper’s own government links: “WaPo, Owned by CIA’s Webmaster, Blasts Venezuela’s ‘State-Financed’ News.” The most relevant bit:

Ah–the administration is just pretending there’s an “unusual and extraordinary threat” because it wants to invoke powers that it’s only legally allowed to use in an actual emergency. No biggie. Thanks for clearing that up, Washington Post!

Apropos of nothing, here’s an interview Chris Hayes did with former CIA official John Kiriakou a few weeks ago, in which Kiriakou describes how the CIA grooms presidents.



Democratic presidents entering office are perceived as hostile or ambivalent, so

The CIA as an organization, as a culture, has sought to bring those presidents into the fold. And we saw it with Bill Clinton, when I was there, and we saw it in spades with Barack Obama. Obama was seen as a potential enemy, and virtually as soon as he took the oath of office, the agency brought him in, taught him the secrets, showed them what they could do. And he became their biggest cheerleader.

Hayes remarks that it sounds similar to how spies are recruited, and Kiriakou responds that the basic techniques are indeed the same:

What you do with a president is you convince the president that not only are you his best friend in government, but you’re going to help make his presidency and make his legacy. And it’s going to benefit him to have a close relationship with the CIA. Starting with his morning intelligence briefing, and going all the way through whatever covert programs happen to pop up….

Hayes notes, “I mean it’s…talk about an advantage over everyone else in government. You get the president every morning.” “Every single morning,” Kiriakou answers, “you have a private meeting with the president. Most members of the cabinet can’t say that.”

“Today Washington made real life imitate Venezuela’s art of story telling.”

I continue to be struck by the similarities between the preposterous claims made by the US Right and its media lackeys about the Obama administration and the preposterous claims made by the Obama administration and its media lackeys about Venezuela and other thorns in the side of US imperialism.

I’m also amazed at the corporate media’s willingness to act as mouthpiece for the assertions of the State Department and the CIA, no matter how harmful, dumb, or seemingly embarrassing and shameful. Venezuela, and not the US, is increasingly isolated in Latin America. Washington “gets tired of Venezuela’s love affair with conspiracy,” and in its exasperation decides to oblige with…a more open conspiracy:

Washington has finally had enough of Venezuela’s obsession with U.S. conspiracy theories. On Monday, the White House gave Venezuela a realistic dose of the bad romance it has consistently written about its relationship with the U.S.

…So today Washington made real life imitate Venezuela’s art of story telling. The White House press office made President Obama’s note to the speakers of the House and Senate public, calling Venezuela’s foreign policy [?] an “unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States.” [emphasis added]

And of course the invasion of Iraq was about bringing democracy to the Middle East.

Judge to US government: Release pictures of detainees being abused

The Intercept reports on a federal judge rejecting the pretexts the government has been using to fight the release of photos of detainee abuse and demanding that they justify withholding each photo on an individual basis or comply with his order to release them:

A federal judge is demanding that the government explain, photo-by-photo, why it can’t release hundreds, and perhaps thousands, of pictures showing detainee abuse by U.S. forces at military prison sites in Iraq and Afghanistan.

In a courtroom in the Southern District of New York yesterday, Judge Alvin Hellerstein appeared skeptical of the government’s argument, which asserted that the threat of the Islamic State and Al Qaeda exploiting the images for propaganda should override the public’s right to see any of the photos.

He was “highly suspicious” of the government’s attempt to declare the whole lot of the photos dangerous. “It’s too easy and too meaningless,” he said.

…“We’re at a line in the sand,” Hellerstein declared. “I’m not changing my view.”

He gave the government a week to decide what it wants to do: appeal the order, or put forward a plan to comply with it. He suggested that the government could present the photos to him, in a closed session, and explain their rationale for keeping them secret. He also advised the government not to try to delay “the day of reckoning” by drawing the case out on appeal.

“Nor do I recall anyone believing that.”

Earlier this month, Rachel Maddow did a segment on Errol Morris’ latest documentary, The Unknown Known, which profiles Donald Rumsfeld.*



As Morris expresses in the film itself and in his interview with Maddow, and as Maddow herself noted, what’s striking is Rumsfeld’s utter unwillingness to be truthful about his past actions or to accept responsibility for them. When Morris says that many in the US had come to suspect or believe that that Saddam Hussein was involved with Al Qaeda and the 9-11 attacks, Rumsfeld responds that “It was very clear that the direct planning for 9-11 was done by Osama Bin Laden’s people, Al Qaeda, and in Afghanistan. I don’t think the American people were confused about that.” After Morris presents him with a 2003 Washington Post poll showing that 69% of the US public believed Saddam Hussein was personally involved in the attacks carried out by Al Qaeda, Rumsfeld answers: “I don’t recall anyone in the Bush administration saying anything like that. Nor do I recall anyone believing that.”

Morris shows a 2003 press conference in which Rumsfeld mocks Saddam Hussein’s denial of involvement as a tale told by a liar. Maddow then produces evidence of Rumsfeld’s explicit public claims about a link between Iraq and Al Qaeda and the 9-11 attacks. Maddow is naturally amazed not only by Rumsfeld’s denial that he knew the US public ever believed in the connection but by his denial “that he had any role in propagating that idea” in the plain face of the evidence that he did. Rumsfeld’s shamelessness reminds me of psychiatry’s latest presentation of the chemical imbalance myth. I’ve been posting about this fairly regularly over the years because I’ve found the blatant hypocrisy exasperating.

The claim that depression, “schizophrenia,” and so on are caused by an imbalance of neurotransmitters in the brain – which has provided the basis for viewing psychological problems as “illnesses” and a justification and mechanism of action for psychiatric drugs - is false. To be very clear: This notion hasn’t been built upon by more sophisticated models of the biological underpinnings of mental illness. First, the chemical imbalance hypothesis (I use the term loosely) has been rejected. There’s nothing to build upon. Second, nothing has replaced it. There is no evidence for the existence of the illnesses claimed in the various DSMs, nor of a biological or genetic pathology causing psychological problems, including the most persistent and extreme.

Moreover, it’s well documented that this has been known in psychiatry for decades. I quoted Robert Whitaker in an earlier post, and it’s worth reading the longer quotation (and in fact the entire interview) in full, but I’ll quote one portion again:

[W]hat you find in this statement by Dr. Pies is a remarkable confession: psychiatry, all along, knew that the evidence wasn’t really there to support the chemical imbalance notion, that it was a hypothesis that hadn’t panned out, and yet psychiatry failed to inform the public of that crucial fact.

By doing so, psychiatry allowed a “little white lie” to take hold in the public mind, which helped sell drugs and of course made it seem that psychiatry had magic bullets for psychiatric disorders. That is an astonishing betrayal of the trust that the public puts in a medical discipline; we don’t expect to be misled in such a basic way.

So that’s the history: like the mythical link between Saddam Hussein and the 9-11 attacks, the chemical imbalance claim was false. It was nevertheless promoted to the public, and very successfully, in order to influence their understanding of their problems and their choices about their health. At the very least, psychiatry has done virtually nothing to disabuse anyone of this notion. The myth has served psychiatry’s claims to scientific status, the power of psychiatrists, and the multi-billion-dollar psychopharmacology industry. The human impact of this lie has been and continues to be enormous.

As Whitaker suggests, it’s become virtually impossible to try to sustain the myth. But what biopsychiatry’s proponents seem to have realized is that it’s become largely self-sustaining – unless they’re directly confronted with questions about the truth of the myth, which rarely happens, they can remain silent and people will continue to believe in some version of it. Or, they can sit back and imply that neurotransmitters are part of a larger set of causal biological mechanisms which still aren’t fully understood (or that the uninitiated aren’t capable of understanding). Meanwhile, others will continue to suggest that it’s true.

Now, all of this is infuriating enough. “Astonishing betrayal of trust” is an understatement for the active and passive perpetuation of such a damaging lie. Even more galling, some openly admit that they mislead patients or the public or condone others doing so (with some help from the media, filmmakers, and others). I’ll repeat: they’ve admitted that the chemical imbalance notion isn’t supported by the evidence and that they’ve misled people with full consciousness that they’re doing so, obviously believing that the public won’t be appalled by this. Even Rumsfeld and company don’t think they can get away with publicly admitting to paternalistic or self-serving lies.

Others, brazenly, try to turn the claim’s falsehood against…their critics. The most egregious example I think I’ve seen was in Richard Friedman and Andrew Nierenberg’s response to Marcia Angell’s two articles in the New Yorker in 2011. Angell had stated, correctly, that:

The shift from “talk therapy” to drugs as the dominant mode of treatment coincides with the emergence over the past four decades of the theory [sic] that mental illness is caused primarily by chemical imbalances in the brain that can be corrected by specific drugs.

…But the main problem with the theory [sic] is that after decades of trying to prove it, researchers have still come up empty-handed.

Friedman and Nierenberg actually try to criticize Angell for using “an outdated and disproven chemical imbalance theory of depression (i.e., serotonin deficiency) as a straw man…” Unfortunately for them, as Angell noted in her reply, another critical response appearing just above theirs by John Oldham, president of the American Psychiatric Association, had implied that this remained a serious hypothesis: “Although psychotropic medications have been found to alter the balance of neurotransmitters in the brain, there is no consensus on whether these imbalances are causes of mental disorders or symptoms of them.”** The neurotransmitter-imbalance notion is hardly a straw man: Angell’s statement that she “still hear[s] it invoked frequently” understates the situation.

But the latest, and worst, psychiatric tactic goes beyond even the claims that the myth is still somehow true or useful, or the suggestion that it’s now outdated and therefore illegitimate to hold against the profession at present. This is the “admission” that no serious psychiatrist ever believed it, the claim that the public probably never really believed it, and the assertion that if belief in it can be shown to be widespread in the past or present, well, the psychiatric profession hasn’t really had a hand in that.

I mentioned a couple such statements in an earlier post. For example, Ronald Pies, editor-in-chief emeritus of the Psychiatric Times, in 2011: “In truth, the ‘chemical imbalance’ notion was always a kind of urban legend—never a theory seriously propounded by well-informed psychiatrists.” Or consider George Dawson’s response to Peter Gøtschze’s recent debunking of common psychiatric myths, the first of which debunked was “Your disease is caused by a chemical imbalance in the brain.” It’s worth quoting Dawson’s response again:

This is a red herring that is frequently marched out in the media and often connected with a conspiracy theory that psychiatrists are tools of pharmaceutical companies who probably originated this idea. What are the facts? …Chemical imbalance rhetoric always seems to ignore one huge fact and that is Eric Kandel's classic article on plasticity in 1979 in the New England Journal of Medicine. Certainly any psychiatrist who saw that article has never bought into a “chemical imbalance” idea and I can recall mocking the idea when pharmaceutical companies presented it to my colleagues and I [sic] in medical school.

So,… Pies and Dawson aren’t trying to keep the zombie myth alive (“Saddam Hussein really was behind the 9-11 attacks in some way”); they’re not just trying to suggest that, while they know it to be false now, the profession believed it earlier and with good reason (“We thought we had good evidence of the links between Iraq and Al Qaeda, but it turned out not to be correct”), or to use the myth’s discrediting against their critics; they’re not trying to justify the lie retrospectively (“We knew the link didn’t exist, but it was a noble lie because we saw the urgency of overthrowing this evil dictator”). We’re fully into “I don’t recall anyone in the Bush administration saying anything like that. Nor do I recall anyone believing that” territory.

They are shamelessly and arrogantly stating – directly in the face of decades of public evidence - that the myth of chemical imbalances wasn’t ever really a significant myth at all. That the whole idea is a “red herring,” part of a “conspiracy theory,” a sort of “rhetoric” used not by psychiatrists but by those trying to discredit psychiatry. It’s an “urban legend,”*** an idea “never seriously propounded” by reputable psychiatrists. Serious psychiatrists never believed it – it was worthy of mockery as early as the 1980s. Really, it’s questionable whether anyone has believed it, they’ve seen no real evidence of that, and if they were to be presented with such evidence they would have no explanation for how that might have come about.

It is, as Whitaker says, a “remarkable confession” when read in light of the historical evidence: they knew it was a lie from the beginning. But the confession is cleverly folded into a denial. Like Rumsfeld, they believe they can acknowledge that the claim was false and still avoid any accountability because they can claim that they don’t recall (or have convinced themselves that they don’t recall) the profession ever really holding or promoting it and don’t accept that it was ever a widespread belief at all. It’s a denial of the plainest historical evidence, a refusal to acknowledge the fundamental implications of the falseness of this myth for psychiatry and psychiatric drugs, and a dismissal of the profound harm done via the perpetuation of this myth. The “astonishing betrayal of…trust” Whitaker describes continues with this offensive and insulting tactic.

* The segment’s impetus and focus was on the possible declassification of a portion of a Senate Intelligence Committee report on CIA interrogation and torture, and how it will bring to public light a history the Bush administration would like to keep buried comfortably in the past.

** This sentence is actually preceded by: “Dr. Angell and the authors she reviews also suggest that psychiatry, in general, regards mental illnesses through the reductionist lens of an imbalance of chemicals in the brain.” Now, I’ve long stopped imagining that such convoluted arguments on the part of psychiatrists are due to poor communication skills and have come to assume deliberate obfuscation. Oldham describes the chemical imbalance idea as reductionist, and then in the next sentence falsely implies that chemical imbalances do exist and are related to “mental disorders” in some way (apparently, the reader is now to understand that the notion of an imbalance as either a cause or a symptom wouldn’t be reductionist; while neither is in fact true – no chemical imbalances, or balances for that matter, have been found - the notion of chemical imbalances as causes of psychological problems is in fact the notion that has been promoted by pharma and psychiatry). It’s all mindbendingly intellectually dishonest.

*** Note the doublespeak: “Urban legend” here is left ambiguous – does it refer to belief within the profession, public beliefs, the fact that psychiatry promoted the myth, or all three?

Not hard to see why they want immunity

Wikileaks' release of a 2006 State Department memo regarding a letter from Philip Alston, UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions, to the US mission in Geneva has spurred new investigations:

As part of the negotiations over keeping US troops in Iraq, Washington is demanding immunity for all US military personnel. But Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Moussawi, said: "We will not give up the rights of the Iraqi people, and this subject will be followed."

The leaked state department memo, dated 27 March, 12 days after the incident, says that the US mission in Geneva had received a letter from Alston, the UN special rapporteur on extrajudicial, summary or arbitrary executions. In his letter, Alston said he had received various reports on the killings, and the dead included Faiz Hratt Khalaf, 28, his wife, three children, his mother, sister, two nieces, a three-year-old and a visiting relative.

"According to the information received, American troops approached Mr Faiz's home in the early hours of 15 March 2006. It would appear that when the MNF [multinational forces] approached the house, shots were fired from it and a confrontation ensued for some 25 minutes. The MNF troops entered the house, handcuffed all residents and executed all of them. After the initial MNF intervention, a US air raid ensued that destroyed the house," Alston wrote. He added: "Iraqi TV stations broadcast from the scene and showed bodies of the victims (ie five children and four women) in the morgue of Tikrit. Autopsies carried out at the Tikrit hospital's morgue revealed that all corpses were shot in the head and handcuffed."