So it’s been bothering me for a long time now: what is it going to take? This country has tolerated the travesty that is the “Drug War” for decades; ok, I grok that as it’s “only” brown and black and poor people who suffer AIDS and rape and death as a result of imprisonment. This country has also come to sleep in and miss the fact that we’re bombing/shooting/raping/killing brown non-xtians in a war of choice; again, I sort of understand as that war is far away and not often on teevee, from which most people construct their ‘reality.’ Obama, unlike MLK, felt the need to surround himself with 000s of “security” folk in a mass grouping of fellow democracts; I guess that’s a statement on how far we’ve (not) come since the glory days of the Civil Rights movement. But St. Paul? MN? Some of you do/have lived there; you must know how gentle and “neighborly” most of MN really is, and how infrequently it’s upset by security theatre. Amy Goodman got arrested. I guess that’s not surprising or worthy news to most people. But gosh, I really do wonder what it will take. Armed camps? Mass arrest of suburbanites? Shooting xtian babies and their moms? Wake up America. Or rather, how do we wake up America? That whole logic of “I was not a [x], so I didn’t speak up when they came for [x]” is starting to seem like so much more than distant memory. Is it just me? Video (one of many from the links)  Read more 

Groups

Social groups have specific characteristics: (a) they consist of two or more people who (b) interact in an ordered fashion, (c) share specific values and norms, and (d) have at least some sense of unity and common goals.

Group conformity / obedience

One of the main influences that groups exercise over their members lies in their capacity to induce conformity – the process through which members modify their behavior to comply with the group’s norms or decisions. Research shows that group pressure does not have to be intense to produce conformity.

One such experiment was conducted by Solomon Asch (1956) to show the power of groups to influence behavior. Asch assembled 6 to 8 students, all accomplices except one, the subject of the experiment. The students were shown a line on card 1 and asked to pick the corresponding line on card 2 (see diagram).

It is obvious that the correct answer is A. At first, Asch’s accomplices answered correctly but in further rounds of the experiment they started answering incorrectly. Asch wanted to see what the subject would do: would he provide the correct answer despite the group’s incorrect consensus or would he go along with the group?

One third of the subjects went along and provided the wrong answer and later admitted they knew it but did not want to be singled out. In other words, they were willing to compromise their judgment for the sake of going along with the group’s (wrong) answer.

Here is a video to illustrate this dynamic further:

 Read more 

Another day, another guy coincidentally dies after being Tased repeatedly.

Via digby:

A Statesville man died after being shocked multiple times by Tasers at the Iredell County jail over the weekend, sources say.

Anthony Davidson, 29, was unresponsive when he was taken to Iredell Memorial Hospital Saturday afternoon. He was put on life support and died late Sunday night, police said.

His death is the second Taser-related death this year in the Charlotte area. In March, 17-year-old Darryl Wayne Turner, died after Charlotte-Mecklenburg police used a Taser on him at a Food Lion store in Charlotte.

[…]

The incident began about 3 p.m. Saturday at a Statesville grocery store. Employees at the Food Lion on N.C. 115 told police they tried unsuccessfully to stop Davidson from leaving the store with a full cart of groceries after his debit card was declined. He left the parking lot without the groceries, police said.

When officers caught up with Davidson a short time later, he was carrying an Applebee’s gift card from the store that hadn’t been paid for, Anderson said.

Officers took Davidson to the Iredell County Jail where he appeared before a magistrate on a larceny charge. Davidson was behaving abnormally from the time officers first encountered him, Anderson said.

While being booked, Davidson became “physically aggressive and was communicating loudly,” Anderson said. That’s when officers used one or more Tasers to get him “back under control,” police said.

A nurse who screened Davidson afterward told officers he needed further medical screening because he appeared to be “under the influence of some type of impairing substance.”

Paramedics took Davidson to the hospital Saturday. His condition continued to decline and he was unresponsive when he arrived, Anderson said. He was admitted to intensive care and was taken off life support about 10:30 p.m. Sunday.

[…]

Davidson’s family said they weren’t aware of him using or having a problem with drugs or alcohol… They said police told them Davidson fell while being subdued and may have hit his head.

An autopsy is scheduled later this week, Moore said.

Last month, the officer involved in the Charlotte Taser incident was cleared of criminal charges [So much for the Milgram Dodge, eh?] but was suspended for five days [wow!] for violating the department’s policy when he continuously shocked Darryl Turner for 37 seconds, a factor that contributed to his death.

They tased him to “get him back under control”. Everything I’ve been told by Taser defenders leads me to believe - and I have no reason to doubt them - that they think Tasers are necessary to prevent the use of lethal force.

There is no discernible reason why lethal force should have been used to “control” an unarmed suspect who is “physically aggressive” (can we see the video?) and “communicating loudly”. I’m pretty sure everyone can agree on that. So why the hell did they Tase him? I am sympathetic to the argument that a Taser is less harmful than a billy club to the head, but the guy was in handcuffs, for christ’s sake.

As Atticus Finch said to Jem, “Never point a gun at a man unless you intend to shoot him, and never shoot a man unless you intend to kill him,” or something to that effect. A Taser may be less likely to kill than a gun but certain people will die from it and that fact seems to be ignored an awful lot in these discussions. Shooting someone with a Taser should be a direct, 1:1 substitute for shooting them with a bullet, without exception.

The naked guy standing in the shower with a towel did not require a bullet. Baron Pikes didn’t require a bullet. The guy who wouldn’t sign his speeding ticket didn’t require a bullet. The Polish guy in the Vancouver airport didn’t require a bullet. The kid with a broken back did not require a bullet. This guy did not require a bullet. I’m not convinced anyone who has died after being Tased has required a bullet. I’m sure that it makes the cops’ jobs easier and safer for themselves if they Tase more people instead of wrestling them to the ground; I don’t care. I’d like my job to be easier and safer, but I don’t get to make the rules. The police do not have a right to a completely submissive citizenry and they should be prevented from trying to create one.

And if you don’t think that’s an accurate description of this cavalier attitude:

Taser-related deaths across North Carolina prompted a coalition to study Taser use. The N.C. Taser Safety Project surveyed the state’s 100 sheriff’s offices and found that 70 issued Tasers to some or all of its deputies, but many agencies lack clear policies about when and how they should be used.

…then what is? Replace “Tasers” with “guns” and it sounds like a story from Baghdad, doesn’t it?

[Bonjour, mon general! —lambert]

An imminent threat

So, yesterday morning, a 16-year-old boy in Ozark, Missouri fell off a 30-foot I-65 overpass for unknown reasons. When the police arrived on the scene, they promptly administered first aid Tased him 19 times because he wouldn’t “comply” with their orders to stand up. (Thank god for Tasers, otherwise they’d have had to put him down like a broken racehorse, eh?)

Mace ended up in intensive care at a hospital. His parents believe the actions of Ozark police officers contributed to his injuries and slowed doctors’ abilities to speed his recovery.

The official explanation:

“He refused to comply with the officers and so the officers had to deploy their Tasers in order to subdue him. He is making incoherent statements; he’s also making statements such as, ‘Shoot cops, kill cops,’ things like that. So there was cause for concern to the officers,” said Ozark Police Capt. Thomas Rousset.

Yeah, I’m sure that’s exactly what he said after falling off a fucking bridge. They must have felt very threatened indeed by a possibly-paraplegic child. No word on whether he announced to the world that he was high on crack and PCP yet.

I don’t even know what to say anymore. It really is a gaslight scenario. I wish I could at least attribute this to racism or something, but it appears these cops are bona fide sociopaths. _{Subliminal Stanley Milgram: No, they’re not! Subliminal me: Harumph…}

I can’t say I’ll be surprised with they start Tasing motorcycle crash victims. We Are All Violently High On Crack And PCP Now.  Read more 

Via Booman, read the whole thing.

Back in the great state of Louisiana, Baron “Scooter” Pikes was spotted by the police while walking peacefully down the street. Given his outstanding warrant for possession, one Officer Nugent gave chase, and Pikes was cornered. Due to his failure to submit, Nugent tased him. Nine times. In 14 minutes. While Pikes surrendered and begged him to stop.

Pikes died shortly thereafter. He was a healthy man of 33 years. Nugent claimed that, in an apparent Bob Woodward-style near-death confession, he told them (in between the screams of pain and death rattles) that he was high on crack and PCP (never heard that one before!) and had asthma. The coroner found no evidence for any of these claims and ruled the death a homicide, but hey, what are you gonna believe, hearsay from a hardly-impartial participant or hard science from a 33-year veteran?

In an apparent goodwill gesture to shock Pikes back to life, Nugent admitted that he tased Pikes twice while he was unconscious and in custody.

I really wish I could link to the part of the Milgram experiment wherein the actor “dies” and the unwitting partipant shocks him again, and again, and again. Gee, I don’t know why. A person administering an electrical shock that they are told is, well, maybe-sorta-safe, but they definitely won’t be held responsible if things go awry… nah, never mind, there’s no similarity there whatsoever. I don’t know what I was thinking.  Read more 

WSJ: Hagel To Join Obama On Iraq Trip

Republican Senator Chuck Hagel of Nebraska will join Barack Obama on his upcoming trip to Iraq, The Wall Street Journal reports.

Hagel voted for the war crimes commission act in addition to all of his pro-war votes. The moral distinction between Hagel and Lyndie England is that she had her picture taken.

Judgment at Nuremberg  Read more 

Cross-posted from the Global Sociology Blog

Standard Operating Procedure is a book co-authored by Philip Gourevitch (also author of the great We Wish to Inform You That Tomorrow, We Will Be killed With Our Families: Stories from Rwanda and writer for the New Yorker) and Errol Morris (director of the great documentary The Fog of War, among others) who also directed the documentary of the same title (incredible website that is well worth checking out with tons of great information that supplement the book very well and makes you impatient for the film to be shown in your area… not yet for me, unfortunately).

The book and documentary are about the Abu Ghraib scandal, of course. We might think that we had read, seen and heard (see also the excellent HBO documentary Ghosts of Abu Ghraib) everything we could probably stomach about this sorry mess but we were wrong. Besides, as a country, we deserve to have this thing shoved in our face on a regular basis because, as the book states, this stain is our own.

And let’s remember that the story of Guantanamo Bay has not been told yet. Who knows what horrors will come out of there? (Although this post by DDay over at Digby’s place, relating how the US offered its Gitmo facilities to the Chinese for torturing purposes and the fact that we’re stuck there because we have a whole bunch of people we can neither trial - because they’ve been tortured - nor release, because, huh, who cares about their excuses anymore… seems to me there will be no end to the evils to be dug up there). And there’s more coming out every day lately: see McClatchy (one of the only decent remaining reporting outfits), the BBC, and Jeralyn at Talk Left.  Read more 

But back to the book itself.

[Welcome knitters. Getcherself an account and educate us about knitting…]

Although watching her is like reading her thesis, about like a hangnail only worse  Read more 

Last week a remarkable truth emerged - we need to have a torture debate. On Friday the President admitted that we are now a state sponsor of torture and an amazing thing happened: Nothing. TV news coverage was dominated by the Democratic primary, and if news outlets acknowledged it at all it was in a summary or somewhere in the back pages. I am on record with my deep revulsion for torture, but a critical mass of our upper political and media levels does not consider it worthy of sustained focus.  Read more 

Fucking torturers. And we’re all complicit. Rather, as I’m sure Arthur Silber has said or is saying — I can’t read Silber without wanting to hang myself, so I don’t — we’ve always been complicit, it’s just that Bush forced us to know that we are.  Read more 

Torture Architect John Yoo Hypocritically Blasts Democratic Party For Violating Constitution’s Intent

Via the indispensable Avedon Carol.

Frank Luntz-isms live on in the Bush White House.

From today’s Presidential Radio Address:

Where do we start?  Read more 

A May 2005 report by Lieutenant General Kevin Kiley confirms that each interrogation at Guantánamo was videotaped. Lieutenant General Randall Schmidt issued a report the following month stating that more than 24,000 interrogations of detainees took place at Guantánamo over a three-year period. In the meantime, the Bush administration has announced it will pursue the death penalty for six detainees who will stand trial for crimes related to the attacks of September 11, 2001.
Professor Mark Denbeaux, Director of the Center for Policy and Research at Seton Hall Law, commented, “Our students proved that Guantánamo interrogations were videotaped, which impacts the impending trials of the six detainees. We all want to see the perpetrators of 9/11 punished. But if the tapes of those interrogations still exist, it is imperative that we understand, before these trials start, whether the information was obtained through standard interrogation procedures or through torture.”

Why videotape a torture session?  Read more 

What follows is a post I wrote some time ago, shortly after Bush’s 2nd Inaugural. I thought it might be worth reposting on this particular day, since it includes a comparison of both Lincoln and Truman to Bush, and seeks to discuss political rhetoric and its discontents. I also thought it might be a pleasant respite from our current obsession with the Democratic Presidential primary, as well as offering a frame for contemplating the ruin Bush’s second terms has wrecked not only on the country, but on his own likely historical reputation.

Dubya’s Dubious Second Inaugural:The Bad Faith Of George W. Bush

Four years ago, at the time of Bush’s 1st Inaugural Address, despite the bitterness left behind by the manner in which the 2000 presidential election was decided, despite the “winner’s” inability to find a graceful way to acknowledge the extraordinary circumstances that had brought him to the Presidency, or even an ungraceful way, swept up in the grandeur of that peaceful transfer of power without which no democratic republic can long endure, I was able to acknowledge the surprising power of some of Bush’s rhetoric, and to feel some hope that he actually meant some tiny fraction of what he was saying.

Nunca mas, as they have had occasion to say in Argentina.

Bush made it easy last Thursday; everything about his second inaugural address, its grandiosity, its simple-minded diction and biblical intimations, the insistent refusal to acknowledge complexity, its wildly overstated and pitifully under-defined ambitions, its ahistorical smugness, struck me as downright preposterous, which will explain my amazement at the credulity with which the speech was received; yes, there were some reservations expressed at the practical implications and applicability of such a pure statement of American idealism, but rather less comment willing to point out that the speech’s efficacy as a statement of policy could be measured in inverse proportion to its almost demented insistence that ideas exist in some ethereal space untouched by anything as gritty and unpleasant as a fact.

Instead, once again we were asked to wonder at the poetic eloquence of Michael Gerson’s prose, and if we happened to be liberals, admonished not to get too picky about the fathoms-deep divide between Bush’s rhetoric and the reality of his policies, lest we peg ourselves, once again, as outside the great and grand ideas upon which our republic stands.

Chris Suellentrop, for instance, writing in Slate, parses the speech to bolster his own praise for it as a wonderful piece of oratory, credits it with announcing a second Bush doctrine, (the first, preemptive war, this second, the peaceful pursuit of democracy everywhere, and nary a hint the two doctrines might contradict one another), then proceeds to question the validity of the speech’s central thesis, which strikes Chris as being as simple-minded as the formulation by “some” on the left, that 9/11 was caused by poverty, and then finishes by warning liberals — well, unlike Mr. Suellentrop, I shall let him speak for himself:  Read more 

Southern Beale beats me to it:

Just to remind everyone about what’s at stake in November, we have these pearls of wisdom from Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia:

“Is it really so easy to determine that smacking someone in the face to determine where he has hidden the bomb that is about to blow up Los Angeles is prohibited in the constitution?” he asked.

“It would be absurd to say you couldn’t do that. And once you acknowledge that, we’re into a different game.”

Oh wow! I saw that episode of “24,” too! Yeah, that was so cool how Jack Bauer saved Los Angeles by smacking that …. oh, wait. That was a TV show.

Never mind.  Read more 

Via Digby:

Delahunt: You said if an opinion was rendered, that would insulate him from any consequences.

[Mike Mukasey, Attorney General of the United States, before the House Judiciary Committee today]: We could not investigate or prosecute somebody for acting in reliance on a justice department opinion.

…

Delahunt: If that opinion was inaccurate and in fact violated a section of US Criminal Code, that reliance is in effect an immunity from any criminal culpability.

MM: Immunity connoted culpability. [Well, is anyone culpable? -scar]

…

Delahunt: I find that a new legal doctrine. The law is the law.  Read more 

[Welcome Drunk Report readers.]

I swear I’m not making this up! And it saddens me, just a little, truly. I would have thought that McCain, having been tortured, would be the very last Republican candidate to throw his hat in this particular ring:

But doggone it—hat tip to alert reader muttley66—once again I just wasn’t cynical enough.

Follow me to the grand guignol below:  Read more 

[Welcome, Digby and C&L readers!]

Yesterday, we asked the question:

How, exactly, did Mike Huckabee’s son David kill that dog?

(To be fair, there was a second Scout involved in the killing with Huckabee; we’ll get to that below.) And, based on the contemporaneous accounts, we gave what we thought was the best answer.

Today, Newsweek’s Michael “Spiky” Isikoff tackles the Huckabee dog-killing story. Using the enormous reportorial resources of the Washington Post operation, he adds some interesting data points, but he circles round the real question which is, again:

How, exactly, did Mike Huckabee’s son David kill that dog?

With that, let’s look at how Spiky moved the story forward, starting with the fact that Huckabee seems to be running Arkansas like a personal fiefdom for the benefit of his family members* instead of like, you know, an actual state of the Union governed by the rule of law:  Read more 

Welcome, I heart Huckabee readers! Welcome, Planet Romney readers!

Here’s the barebones story of how 17-year-old Mike Huckabee’s son, David, and 18-year-old Clayton Frady killed a dog when they were Boy Scouts, and got fired for it.* From the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette in 1998 (as quoted in DogBlog):

[David Huckabee,] the younger son of Gov. Mike Huckabee and another teen were fired last month from jobs at a Boy Scout camp after the killing of a stray dog.

So, why were they fired? For violating Scout Law.

Marcal Young of Texarkana, scout executive of the Caddo Area Council that operates the camp where the dog was killed, said this week that two boys violated a Scout law, “A Scout is kind.”

So, how and why did David Huckabee (and Clayton Frady) kill the dog?  Read more 

At the very end of Froomkin’s chat yesterday, there is this little gem:

Stony Brook, N.Y.: Everybody seems to accept the claim that the CIA tapes were destroyed. Given the long history of deceptions by this administration, shouldn’t we ask for proof, or at least sworn statements to that effect?

Dan Froomkin: A good point. And consider this. Michael Isikoff and Mark Hosenball write in Newsweek: “At one point portions of the tapes were electronically transmitted to CIA headquarters in Langley, Va., so a small number of officials there could review them. A counterterrorism source, who also asked for anonymity when discussing this subject, said that there was no reason to believe that any recordings of such an electronic feed still exist.”

No, no, of course not. No reason whatever. (Except that, as we know from the Stasi and, say, Guatemala, totalitarian regimes hang onto all their data.)

And who knows the dataflows? Where the data goes, its nature and volume, its timing, and who has privileges to see it? The techs. Could we talk to them, please? Didn’t we get good results when we talked to Alexander Butterfield?  Read more