Monthly Archives: November 2011

The United Nations Framework Convention Convention on Climate Change has begun its annual conference of the parties in Durban. From the start, the news is depressing, and as Lesley McAlister noted in her blog, has a bit of a deja vu quality, and not in a good way. The Chief Economist of the International Energy Agency, Fatih Birol, indicated that we’re on track for 6 degrees of warming by 2100 if we don’t change our energy use patterns. Meanwhile, Canada, which is failing to meet its Kyoto Protocol commitments, has announced it won’t sign on for another commitment period. While there are many nuanced negotiations going on regarding many important issues, which small groups of people fully understand, the progress on some of these topics since last year’s Cancun negotiations does not address the fundamental problem: we are nowhere any kind of big picture solution to this problem. This is why the soon-to-be-released casebook I’m writing with Lesley McAlister ends with major climate change and geo-engineering as it’s two primary scenarios, and asks our students to try to get us to an alternative future.

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“The devastating events of 9-11 brought a tangle of complex issues, dangerous realities, and hard choices.

To help meet these challenges, the United States began interrogating detainees.

The interrogation settings included the Abu Ghraib Prison in Iraq, the Detention Center at Bagram Airbase in Afghanistan, and Camps Delta, Iguana, and X-Ray at Guantanamo Bay Naval Base.

The American Psychological Association (APA) played a key role in supporting detainee interrogations and highlighted psychologists’ contributions to this aspect of national security.

For example, APA submitted a statement on psychology and interrogations to the US Senate Select Committee on Intelligence explaining that “psychologists have important contributions to make in eliciting information that can be used to prevent violence and protect our nation’s security”; that “conducting an interrogation is inherently a psychological endeavor”; and that “psychology is central to this process” (American Psychological Association, 2007b).

U.S. officials also saw a central role for psychologists: “Pentagon officials said . . . they would try to use only psychologists, not psychiatrists, to help interrogators devise strategies to get information from detainees at places like Guantanamo Bay, Cuba. The new policy follows by little more than two weeks an overwhelming vote by the American Psychiatric Association discouraging its members from participating in those efforts” (Lewis, 2006).

APA promoted support for its interrogation policies in its press releases, its journals, its web site, its Internet lists, its conventions, the APA Monitor on Psychology, and other venues. Continue reading →

by andré douglas pond cummings America’s middle class is disappearing.  The emergence of Occupy Wall Street highlights a growing oligarchy in American society.  An oligarchy is defined by Merriam-Webster as “a government in which a small group exercises control especially … Continue reading →