Abnormal brains wired for lies. 18/10/2005. ABC News Online

ABC Online

Abnormal brains wired for lies. 18/10/2005. ABC News Online

[This is the print version of story http://www.abc.net.au/news/newsitems/200510/s1484365.htm]

Last Update: Tuesday, October 18, 2005. 6:05am (AEST)
Habitual liars and cheaters may have less grey matter in their brains.

Habitual liars and cheaters may have less grey matter in their brains. (ABC TV)

Abnormal brains wired for lies

Pathological liars may have structural abnormalities in their brains, a new study suggests.

Researchers have found that individuals who habitually lie and cheat have less grey matter and more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than normal people.

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Dr Adrian Raine and Yaling Yang of the University of Southern California and colleagues report their findings in the British Journal of Psychiatry.

Past studies have found that the prefrontal cortex shows heightened activity when normal people lie.

It is believed to be involved in both learning moral behaviour and feeling remorse.

The new study suggests that because grey matter consists of brain cells, while white matter forms the "wiring" or connections between these cells, pathological liars may have more capacity to lie and fewer moral restraints.

"They've got the equipment to lie and they don't have the disinhibition that the rest of us have in telling the big whoppers," Dr Raine said.

The researchers used a series of psychological tests and interviews in a group of volunteers to identify 12 pathological liars, 16 people with antisocial personality disorder but no history of lying, and 21 normal people.

They then examined the brains of all study participants using magnetic resonance imaging.

Liars had 26 per cent more white matter in their prefrontal cortex than people with antisocial personality disorder, and 22 per cent more than normal people.

But they had 14 per cent less grey matter than normal individuals.

Interestingly, autistic people - who are known to have difficulty lying - show a shift in grey-to-white matter ratio opposite to that seen among liars in the current study.

"Although autism is a complex condition and cannot be taken as a model for lying, these results on autistic children, combined with the prior fMRI findings on lying in normal controls, converge with current findings on adult liars suggesting that the prefrontal cortex is centrally involved in the capacity to lie," the authors write.

The authors also note that while small children are not good liars, by the age of 10 - by which time a burst in white matter volume has occurred - they become much more proficient in telling falsehoods.

While the findings have no practical implications at present, if confirmed they could be useful in clinical diagnoses of whether a person is pretending to be sick.

They could also help in criminal justice settings by helping police determine if a suspect is lying, and in pre-employment screening.

- Reuters


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Counterbias: What The Gruesome Images Say

What The Gruesome Images Say


October 11 2005
Counterbias.com
by John Chuckman


There was recently an Internet site that displayed extraordinarily gruesome photographs taken by American soldiers in Iraq. Apparently, the owner of the site exchanged access to pornography for soldiers sending him their war pictures.

Digital cameras and the Internet are now providing a real glimpse of war to an American public that still daydreams about fresh-faced boys and girls marching off to do brave deeds on behalf of democracy.

The Pentagon has become concerned about the site, and rightly so. It is a public relations disaster, especially in the Arab world where such pictures must burn deeply. Karen Hughes peddling American Sunday School stories in the Middle East can hardly compete with the visceral impact of this stuff. It is not just the images themselves which evoke disgust, but the implicit idea that Americans take such pictures and regard them as legitimate currency for pornography.

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One Pentagon official was quoted saying something about the people engaged in the trade breaking all kinds of military regulations. I'm impressed with ethics like that: it is fine to disembowel people or burn them to crisps, but it is a serious breach to publish photos of your handiwork.

When I was a little boy growing up in the south side of Chicago, I saw many unpleasant things. Somehow, I understood at a young age that there are people who enjoy destruction and horror and inflicting pain. Likely all the legends of ghouls, vampires, and other staples of horror literature derive over centuries from genuine human experience.

They seem to constitute a minority of human beings, otherwise humanity's penchant for destruction would outweigh its impulse for creation, and a form of human entropy would reduce society to chaos. But they are a sizeable minority, and there is nothing special about America which prevents its producing a full share. If we believe that nurture, as well as nature, plays some role in producing these dark creatures, American society may well produce more than its share. They are after all, at least the milder, non-lethal cases, the very people who take pleasure in injuring complete strangers through business fraud, computer viruses, and vicious politics - all prominent features on the American landscape.

There is a persistent tendency for Americans to believe this can't be so. The influence of Christianity is important here. Since the idea of America is often emotionally blurred with the idea of a secular Church, complete with its own Apostles' Creed and Holy Scripture (Pledge of Allegiance, Declaration of Independence, etc.), it is not surprising that there is widespread belief in the intrinsic goodness of America's soldiers. But that belief is as scientifically baseless as the one about "curing" homosexuals or the one about "creationism" being a legitimate school subject - both, please note, held by tens of millions of Americans. We might add also the American Catholic Church's dreamy ideas and stubborn refusal to take responsibility for conditions of a priesthood that encourage countless cases of child molestation.

Those who enjoy violence and destruction always have been part of human society, likely representing a genetic thread, and in ancient days they were just the kind of people you might want on the ramparts defending your city. The trouble is America doesn't keep them at home. It insists on sending them abroad to practice their ghastly arts on others.

I have to suppress a bitter laugh when I read things in the liberal press calling on soldiers to hold on to their humanity. Would those be the sons of the soldiers who cut the throats of tens of thousands of civilians in night raids during Vietnam? The sons of the ones who collected human ears? Relatives of CIA officers running an international torture network? The words serve no purpose for those actually possessing humanity. Equally, they are a waste of breath for those with the bad genes. You can't tell someone with a serious, violence-inclining mental disorder to kindly behave him- or herself.

We have a choice in society. The people who have such uncivilized tendencies may be kept in check by rational laws and policies. America with its high rate of incarceration, its continued use of the death penalty, and its endless fascination with redemption clearly recognizes in some distorted way the importance of doing this at home. What civilized people all over the world want to see is America exercising restraint abroad.

How utterly reckless to just casually start wars without realizing that releasing the human monsters from their cages always is part of what you are doing. If Americans ever come to understand that simple fact, the world will be a better place.


John Chuckman, a lifelong student of history, is former chief economist for a large Canadian oil company. His writing has appeared in Counterpunch, Media Monitors, Online Journal, Scoop, and Dissident Voice.

The unfeeling president should be impeached

If not psychopathic, then still pretty damn far towards that end of the scale. Editor

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The unfeeling president should be impeached

By Carla Binion
Online Journal Associate Editor

September 10, 2005—The novelist E. L. Doctorow once said of George W. Bush, "He is the president who does not feel. He does not feel for the families of the dead, he does not feel for the 35 million of us who live in poverty."

Bush's disconnect from normal human feeling, his general lack of seriousness and abysmal leadership skills have always been evident. His response to the recent hurricane has only highlighted them. What are the consequences of our failure to hold Bush accountable?

Bush's demeanor has been eerily upbeat as thousands of corpses floated through the streets of New Orleans. He said in one recent speech, "The good news is—and it's hard for some to see it now—that out of this chaos is going to come a fantastic Gulf Coast, like it was before. Out of the rubbles of Trent Lott's house—he's lost his entire house—there's going to be a fantastic house. And I'm looking forward to sitting on the porch."

The emotional disconnect runs in the family. After viewing hurricane evacuees at the Houston Astrodome, the presidentﾒs mother, Barbara Bush, said: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

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If any of us ever doubted that empathy and mature seriousness are necessary character traits in a political leader, few doubt it now. Bush's response to Hurricane Katrina and his failure to promptly aid hurricane victims contributed to thousands, possibly as many as 10,000, needless deaths. This could be described as criminal negligence or murder by neglect.

The human suffering has been ghastly. One newspaper, Scotland's Sunday Herald, quoted Robert Lewis, a hurricane victim who was bused to Texas: "There were bodies floating past my door. We were, like, on an island. We did the best we could. We were just like zombies walking around at night." The same paper reported: "At least a thousand corpses, some being eaten by rats, are floating through the city's drowned streets . . . People are killing themselves in despair."

In at least one of the city's evacuation shelters, people were murdered and raped, including one child. Tens of thousands lived for days among raw sewage and suffocating heat, with virtually no food and water and no help from government officials.

While this suffering went on, Bush made one flippant remark after another and did lighthearted photo ops. He fell back on Karl Rove-inspired spin, warning that his critics should avoid "politicizing" the hurricane tragedy, as if covering his own tracks were his primary concern.

Much of the misery and death was preventable. Articles in the New Orleans Times-Picayune reveal that Bush cut funding for Army Corp of Engineers projects to strengthen and raise New Orleans levees, despite the paper's repeated warnings that disastrous flooding was certain to occur. The paper reported it was "a matter of when, not if" levee improvement would be needed.

The Times-Picayune reported on June 8, 2004: "It appears that the money [for the levees] has been moved in the president's budget to handle homeland security and the war in Iraq."

Bush also undercut the authority of the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) by shifting it into the Department of Homeland Security, thereby weakening its effectiveness in preventing catastrophic hurricane damage. Despite these facts, the administration's spin has been that they couldn't have done anything in advance that might have helped alleviate the massive loss of life.

The spin has also been that the president will later conduct his own investigation to determine what went wrong, as if the above information weren't already widely known. We don't need further investigation to show Bush bears responsibility.

For the first two days of the crisis, Bush piddled around his ranch. He gave a speech comparing the Iraq war to World War II, and laughed while playing guitar with a country singer.

He gave silly, out of touch speeches, as did his Homeland Security chief, Michael Chertoff, who said at one press conference on the fourth day after the flooding began, "Hopefully, most people have gotten themselves onto roofs and have been picked up. But, as I said, rather than give you a guesstimate, I can tell you that as long as there is someone on a roof waving a flag, we're going to be sending a helicopter out there to get them."

All Americans who voted for Bush, and those in Congress and the mainstream media who have placed confidence in his leadership, should remember this fact: The signs were there all along that this man didn't have the mental acumen or depth needed to lead the country.

People laughed when warned Bush would only serve as an ill-informed figurehead, delegating all responsibility to others. It turns out the president isn't even good at delegating, considering, for example, the performance of his delegated head of FEMA.

Many media pundits insisted Bush's incurious nature and his failure to read widely or reflect deeply wouldn't be necessary in a president. However, a better informed, more thoughtful leader might have heeded the disaster warnings and acted quickly to save thousands of lives.

As E. L. Doctorow wrote, "The president we get is the country we get. With each president the nation is conformed spiritually. He is the artificer of our malleable national soul. He proposes not only the laws but the kinds of lawlessness that govern our lives and invoke our responses.

"This president does not know what death is. He hasn't the mind for it. You see him joking with the press, peering under the table for the weapons of mass destruction he can't seem to find, you see him at rallies strutting up to the stage in shirt sleeves to the roar of the carefully screened crowd, smiling and waving, triumphal, a he-man.

"He does not mourn. He doesn't understand why he should mourn . . . To mourn is to express regret and he regrets nothing . . . He does not regret that, rather than controlling terrorism, his war in Iraq has licensed it. So he never mourns for the dead and crippled youngsters who have fought this war of his choice . . . He cannot mourn but is a figure of such moral vacancy as to make us mourn for ourselves."

As we mourn the unnecessary deaths brought on by Bush's Iraq war and the preventable deaths caused by the recent hurricane, we need to remember that for far too long many Americans coddled and enabled this unfeeling, emotionally disconnected, lightweight, incompetent president. The blood on his hands is also on the hands of any people who knew what he was and supported him anyway, and no amount of Karl Rove's spin or Republican talking points can change that reality.

Bush supporters say now (as they've said since Bush first seized office) that their critics should be silent. They say now isn't the time to address the Bush administration's misconduct regarding the hurricane.

Would this be a bad time to bring up the fact that the majority of Hurricane Katrina's victims were African Americans who were living in poverty? Martin Luther King said in his letter from the Birmingham City Jail: "We will have to repent in this generation not merely for the vitriolic words and actions of the bad people, but for the appalling silence of good people."

Knowing what we now know about Bush's character and failed leadership, silence would again be an appalling option. Thousands of lives might have been saved if we'd held this unfeeling, tragically inept president accountable long ago.




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Snakes in suits Spot the true psychopath among the sharks in your office

>Snakes in suits
Spot the true psychopath among the sharks in your office

By Giles Whittell / The Times of London

HERE ARE SOME facts: Andrew Fastow, formerly of Enron, stands accused by an American court of taking $30 million in kickbacks from the company while its shareholders lost more than $70 billion. Bernie Ebbers, formerly of WorldCom, is said to have arranged for his telecommunications firm to lend him $408 million as it slid towards bankruptcy. John Rigas, founder of the Adelphia cable TV giant, built himself a $13 million private golf course and, it is claimed, "borrowed" more than $3 billion from company accounts for his family while his shareholders saw $60 billion wiped from their investments. And here is a perfectly sober conclusion: if guilty, they are all psychopaths. Not killers. Not rapists. Not necessarily even criminals. Just cold-blooded, remorseless, egomaniacal psychopaths.

It's a tricky word. Being a psychopath is not something that ordinary people aspire to, but neither does it have to involve face-eating cannibalism. The central qualification is to show no conscience; to fail to empathize.

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Fastow, Rigas and the other stars of the great corporate meltdown showed little sign of conscience before - or since - being accused by the lumbering U.S. court system, and they share other symptoms of psychopathy. They radiated charisma and authority, but hid much about themselves and their organizations. They revelled in risk, took no account of its potential cost to others or themselves, and rose to power during a time of chaos and upheaval.

When their worlds imploded, the markets staggered in disbelief. Hundreds of thousands of employees and investors lost pensions, savings and money they could ill afford to have gambled. The bosses expressed scant regret and most of them continue to insist that they have done nothing wrong. Meanwhile, regulators, FBI agents and forensic psychologists, not to mention the fleeced American middle class, continue to scratch their heads and wonder how these apparent shysters got to where they did.

A diffident-sounding Canadian academic with a trim grey beard has an answer; possibly the answer. He first voiced it publicly to an audience of Canadian police officers in Newfoundland in August.

At the end of a talk on organised crime, Dr. Robert Hare mentioned his belief that some of the year's worst accounting scandals could have been avoided if all chief executives were screened for psychopathic tendencies. He was quoted everywhere, not so much because of the sensational implication that some of America's best-known companies had been run for most of the 1990s by people with a major mental disorder, as because of who he is.

Hare defined psychopathy for modern scientists with an exhaustive questionnaire, sold only to clinicians, called the Psychopathy Checklist, or PCL-R. It was introduced in 1980 and has become an internationally recognized instrument for identifying psychopaths. It means that when a subject scores 30 (out of a possible 40) in a prison in Dundee, an expert in Detroit will have a good idea of his proclivities.

That's the good news. The bad news is that the PCL-R revealed that psychopaths are everywhere. Most are non-violent, but all leave a trail of havoc through their families and work environments, using and abusing colleagues and loved ones, endlessly manipulating others, constantly reinventing themselves.

Hare puts the average North American incidence of psychopathy at one per cent of the population, but the damage they inflict on society is out of all proportion to their numbers, not least because they gravitate to high-profile professions that offer the promise of control over others, such as law, politics,

By the Hare definition there are 300,000 in Canada alone.

Despite this, spotting psychopaths is hard, though it may be about to get easier. Next year Hare and a New York-based colleague, Paul Babiak, will publish a book called Snakes in Suits: When Psychopaths Go To Work, that will at least alert the average office worker to the possibility that her amusing but exasperating - and, frankly, narcissistic and untrustworthy - colleague may be clinically psychopathic. Hare and Babiak will also produce a new diagnostic tool based on the PCL-R but designed to help businesses to keep their recruits and senior management psychopath-free.

Enter the B-Scan. It won't be available to everyone, and it won't be free. Slightly jarringly, one is reminded that its authors are businessmen as well as academics. But they insist that it will do a better job of raising warning flags than traditional screening techniques such as CVs (routinely falsified and seldom checked) and interviews and role-playing ("Psychopaths love this stuff," Hare says. "It's like a game to them.").

If you are B-Scanned, it won't be you answering the questions. It will be your colleagues, grading your personal style, interpersonal relations, organisational maturity and antisocial tendencies according to 16 buzz words, none of them uplifting. They include the following: insincere, arrogant, insensitive, remorseless, shallow, impatient, erratic, unreliable, unfocused, parasitic, dramatic, unethical and bullying.

Yikes. Who isn't most of these things, at least some of the time?

I meet Hare in a London hotel and find him used to such anxieties.

"I know, I know," he says. "People read this stuff and suddenly everyone around them is a psychopath. They pick up on three or four of the characteristics and say, 'yeah, he's one.' But it's not like that. It's a medical syndrome. You've got to have the whole package."

And when you do, what does it look like? Hare gives an example, and not just any example. He first gave it to Nicole Kidman in a private meeting requested by her to help her prepare for her memorably chilly role in Malice.

"I gave her a scene," he says. "You're walking down the street and there's been an accident. A child has been hit by a car and is lying on the ground. There's a crowd around him. The mother's kneeling down there crying and emoting. You're curious but not appalled. You look at the child momentarily and then you look at the mother. You walk towards her, step in some blood and then study the mother's facial expressions for a minute or two. Then you walk back to your apartment or hotel room, walk into the bathroom and stand in front of the mirror practising those expressions. I said, 'If you did that, people would see that you don't understand emotion, you have no idea at all, you're a colour-blind person trying to explain colour.' They didn't use the scene, but they could have."

In the workplace such a person might resemble Dave, a real individual studied by Babiak who cut a swath of disruption through a highly profitable American electronics company in the mid-1990s. Dave was good-looking, well spoken and impressive in the interview that led to his recruitment. He was also a skilled and shameless liar, rude to subordinates, scheming towards his boss and quickly friendly with the firm's top management. Already on his third marriage by his mid-thirties, he was short tempered, happy to ignore assignments that he felt were beneath him, and quick to change the subject if challenged on a lie or asked to produce some real evidence of work.

When his boss summoned the courage and evidence to make a complaint to the company president, he found that Dave had got there first and secured for himself the status of "high-potential employee."

The boss ended up sidelined. Dave ended up promoted, swaggering and "in love with himself." He scored 19 on the PCL-R, lower than you would expect for a psychopathic murderer but much higher than your average working non-psychopath. He or she would score a five at most.

People such as Dave can be spotted early. Babiak recommends checking CVs exhaustively and auditing expenses - psychopaths like to indulge. It all seems obvious, but for the past 10 or 12 years, for most of corporate America, it hasn't been.

These have been tumultuous years in the world of business, with dot-coms booming and collapsing, older firms merging or shrinking to catch up, and hierarchies everywhere flattening faster than the boss can say: 'Hey, c'mon in, my door is always open.' In short, it has been a high old time for psychopaths.

"When you see what has happened with Enron and WorldCom and all these other big corporations, and you ask how the hell could this guy get in that position, well, there are answers," Hare says.

"When the structure's not there, when charisma is extremely important and style wins over substance, and one person ends up with three or four hundred million pounds in an offshore bank account, I start to get suspicious. And when the whole thing breaks and people are losing their pensions and livelihoods, these people give nothing back.

"Many of the high-level executives now being charged knew exactly what they were doing. They had no concern for anybody else, and you have to say they aren't warm, loving guys."

Likewise in politics. "Think what happened in the former Soviet Union and the former Yugoslavia. The old rules went by the board. Structure vanished and all the ethnic tension that had been held in check by central government began to emerge. It was the perfect set-up for an opportunist, a thug or a psychopath to enter and take over."

That takeover usually has three stages. First, the psychopath identifies those who can help him and cultivates them with all his considerable charm. Then he pinpoints those who can harm him and outflanks them or stabs them in the back. Finally he makes a sycophantic but ultimately devastating beeline towards the source of power (one thinks of Hitler and Hindenburg, but also of the irrepressible Eve Harrington in All About Eve).

Psychopaths necessarily have victims, and Hare's drive to expose the "subcriminal" ones in our midst is at least partly personal. He speaks of an old college friend, now gravely ill, who lost $500,000 in a mortgage scam to a white-collar crook who got off with a $100,000 fine and a six-month trading ban. Society still labels such people rogues at worst. Hare calls them natural- born predators.

There is a difficulty approaching all this from outside academe: it can seem as if the experts are using jargon to force a thousand shades of grey - for there are surely at least that many degrees of psychopathy - into convenient boxes for personnel managers, employment tribunals and courts.

Babiak certainly counsels caution. Being psychopathic is not a sin, let alone a ground on its own for dismissal. But underpinning the PCL-R is hard science, hard to ignore. Before he published it, Hare performed two now-famous studies which suggest that psychopaths really are different from the rest of us. In the first, subjects were told to watch a timer counting down to zero, at which point they felt a harmless but painful electric shock. Non-psychopaths showed mounting anxiety and fear. Psychopaths didn't even sweat.

In the second, the two groups had their brain activity and response time measured when asked to react to groups of letters, some forming words, some not. Words such as rape and cancer triggered mental jolts in nonpsychopaths. In psychopaths they triggered precisely nothing.

That research is decades old now. The man behind it, instead of retiring, tours the world helping to nail the psychopaths among us and trying to make sure that his instruments are not misused.

Part of his mission is to stay serious. He won't appear on Oprah, and he won't name names. Instead, when he sees someone in the news he thinks might be a psychopath, he says: "I'd sure as hell like to study this guy."

CONTEXT - This Week in Arts and Ideas from The Moscow Times

Chris Floyd: 'Child abuse'
Posted on Friday, June 24 @ 09:39:30 EDT
This article has been read 875 times.

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By Chris Floyd, Moscow Times

When the public liars sat down together -- in Crawford, in the Pentagon, in the Oval Office, at 10 Downing Street -- and very deliberately, very guilefully and very knowingly devised their act of mass murder in Iraq, it is unlikely they gave any thought to the most vulnerable targets of their war crime: the children. So in considering this aspect of the bloodbath, we should give the liars the benefit of the doubt. Let's not make them more monstrous than they are. Let's stick to the facts.

Let us say -- as the incontrovertible facts compel us to say -- that they were willing to kill tens of thousands of innocent people in an action they knew to be illegal, reckless, ill-planned and unsupported by evidence; that they knew their public statements about the plans for war were lies; that they started the war with a vicious bombing campaign months before obtaining even a fig leaf of approval from their respective legislatures, a clear and treasonous violation of their own national laws; that long before their blitzkrieg rolled across the border, they were already divvying up the loot of conquest: the oil rights, the "privatizations," the crony contracts.

In short, let us say that, yes, they are killers, liars, thieves and incompetent fools. But let's not imagine that as they settled their safe and cosseted backsides into the fine upholstery of their elegantly appointed war rooms, they gleefully regaled each other with visions of the exquisite tortures they would soon inflict upon the children of Iraq.



Let's not imagine George W. Bush nudging Tony Blair in the ribs as they masticated their pork together, saying, "Cholera, eh? Typhoid fever. Malnutrition! By God, we can grind these Iraqi children lower than the slum rats of Haiti!" Let's not picture Dick Cheney chiding Donald Rumsfeld over the steak tartare: "Damn it, Don, if there's a single pregnant Iraqi woman left without hepatitis before we're through, heads are going to roll! I want the wombs of those Arab cows swimming in lethal viruses. Lethal, do you hear me?"

Of course it wasn't like that. Such suppositions do these honored national leaders a grave injustice. No doubt their discourse was elevated, focused on lofty matters of state and strategy, on the practicalities of logistics and presentation. If anyone there spoke of the "human factor" -- the actual reality of bleeding flesh, of death, wounds, disease and rot -- it would only have been as part of the political calculations: What level of casualties would the American people accept, how do we keep the dead and maimed out of the public eye? It was all about numbers, processes, abstractions. Nothing to disturb the moral imagination, nothing to put them off the hearty meals and tasty snacks discreetly laid before them by the servants.

So when leading international agencies -- including the World Bank, now headed by one of the chief liars, Paul Wolfowitz -- find that Iraq's children are dwindling and dying twice as fast under the coalition's benevolent care than under the despotism of Saddam Hussein, we should not conclude that this was the liars' conscious intention. Yes, it's true that Iraq's child malnutrition rate is now worse than the broken nations of Uganda or Haiti, as the Japan Times reports. Yes, cholera and typhoid are cutting swaths through the population, with especial virulence in the "stable" areas of the Shiite south. Yes, epidemics of hepatitis are killing pregnant women. Yes, antibiotics are scarce, leaving children, the old and the weak to die of common infections -- that is, when they can get treated at all in a health system ravaged by the liars' war and its atrocious aftermath. (Such as the destruction of Fallujah, for example, when coalition forces deliberately destroyed the city's health clinics and imprisoned doctors to prevent news of civilian casualties from leaking to the press, as the Pentagon's own "information specialists" told The New York Times.)

And yes, it's true that Iraq -- once a modern and prosperous nation -- has suffered "one of the most dramatic declines in human welfare in recent history" during the occupation, as the UN says. But again, this was not part of the liars' deliberate design. The torment of children was outside the parameters of their "metrics of success." It was not a factor one way or the other.

In fact, let's go even further and declare forthrightly that if the liars could have established a client regime and a permanent military presence in Iraq without harming the hair of a single child, they would have done so. If they could have transferred more than $300 billion from the public treasury to the pockets of their family members and business partners without having to concoct a brutal and baseless war of aggression, they would have done so. If they could have legitimized their radical, rapacious domestic agenda without engineering the slaughter of innocent people in order to assume the politically expedient role of "wartime leaders," they would have done so.

But they couldn't. So like all murderers, they did whatever they had to do to get what they wanted, regardless of the consequences for others. Like all terrorists, they rationalized their atrocities with noble rhetoric, citing the unassailable righteousness of their cause as justification for the unspeakable evil they were unleashing. And like all abusers of innocent children, they covered up their baser motives with self-serving lies.

Annotations

Unending Health Disaster for Iraqi Kids
Japan Times, June 18, 2005

Iraq Attacks Preceded Congressional OK
San Francisco Chronicle, June 19, 2005

Former Reagan Official: This is War Waged by Liars and Morons
CounterPunch, June 21, 2005

They Died So Republicans Could Take the Senate
Buzzflash.com, June 20, 2005

House Agrees to Spend More for Iraq War
Reuters, June 21, 2005

Heat and Dust: Inside the Green Republic
Baghdad Burning, June 21, 2005

WMD Claims Were Totally Implausible, says Key UK Diplomat
The Guardian, June 20, 2005

Why the Memo Matters
TomDispatch, June 19, 2005

How Much Proof Needed Before the Truth Comes Out?
Online Journal, June 17, 2005

British Documents Show Determined U.S. March to War
Knight-Ridder, June 17, 2005

Down the Iraqi Rabbit Hole
TomDispatch, June 15, 2005

US Lied to Britain Over use of Napalm in Iraq War
The Independent, June 17, 2005

Bush Wanted to Invade Iraq if Elected in 2000, Says Family Biographer
Guerilla News, Oct. 27, 2004

British Military Chief Reveals New Legal Fears Over Iraq War
The Observer, May 1, 2005

Copyright © 2005 The Moscow Times.

Reprinted from The Moscow Times:
http://context.themoscowtimes.com/stories/2005/06/24/120.html


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Another Day in the Empire - The Psychopathic Straight Talk of John Bolton

May 12, 2005
The Psychopathic Straight Talk of John Bolton

Here’s Senator George Allen, Republican “representing” Virginia and would-be presidential candidate, on nominating John Bolton as United Nations home wrecker:

We are not electing Mr. Congeniality. We do not need Mr. Milquetoast in the United Nations. We’re not electing Mr. Peepers to go there and just be really happy, and drinking tea with their pinkies up and just saying all these meaningless things when we do need a straight talker, and someone who’s going to go there and shake it up.

In other words, if Bush’s nominee had not expressed unveiled contempt for the United Nations on numerous occasions, that person would be “Mr. Milquetoast,” a reference to the Harold Webster cartoon character, Casper Milquetoast, a timid and retiring man. Instead, Allen, as a Bush Republican, believes it is prudent to nominate somebody who would otherwise likely be enrolled in an anger management program, a swaggering bully who wants to home wreck the United Nations and who believes if the “U.N. secretary building in New York lost 10 stories, it wouldn’t make a bit of difference,” in other words there doesn’t need to be a United Nations or international law, just unilateral and preemptive warfare waged by the United States against a shifting roster of enemies.

It should be noted that John Bolton “gained entry to the Reagan administration through strong support from Senator Helms and from New Right strategist Richard Viguerie and his influential Conservative Digest,” according to Right Web. “During Reagan’s second term, Bolton began working together with a team of Federalist Society lawyers under Attorney General Edwin Meese. With Federalist Society members and activists in top policy positions, the Justice Department for the first time came under the ideological influence of the New Right.”

Federalist Society members “oppose liberalism in the international arena in the form of international law and multilateral governance,” in other words they believe the United States, under a hand-picked reactionary leadership, should be running the world. It should be noted that the Federalist Society, described as a “cabal against the libs,” is bankrolled by Richard Mellon Scaife (who has forked over $340 million to fund the ongoing war against the “libs,” or anybody who is not a reactionary nut case positively gung-ho over the prospect of invading impoverished countries and using a wrecking ball on the United Nations building). Strausscon fellow traveler, Newt Gingrich, admits “Scaife’s money laid the basis for modern conservatism,” according to Brooks Jackson of CNN. Thanks to Scaife’s money, “conservative ideas once dismissed as flaky or extreme moved into the mainstream,” write Robert G. Kaiser and Ira Chinoy for the Washington Post. One such idea is that the United States should bomb and kill millions of people and the rest of the world (the remaining 95 percent of all humans) need only sit by and watch.

John Bolton’s “straight talk” (that is when he is not angrily chasing petty government bureaucrats around the hallways of hotels) consists of telling the rest of the world the United States will invade (or otherwise undermine) North Korea, Syria, Iran, Cuba, and other nations on the Strausscon hit list and if they don’t like it they can (expletive) off, otherwise they will end up on the list too (or at minimum have their name removed from the language, as France did) and have their water purification plants and hospitals bombed, their grandmothers and babies starved to death, and their land and water poisoned with depleted uranium. In short, Bolton’s “straight talk” is a dangerous manifestation of an antisocial personality disorder, common among reactionaries, with a predisposition toward criminality (in regard to the Bush administration, the most obvious example is the commission of war crimes, defined in part as “grave breaches” of the Geneva Conventions).

No, John Bolton is no Casper Milquetoast. Bush and Bolton have yet to claim they own the sword of Mars, as myth claims Attila the Hun did, but it would not be surprising if they did on the day after tomorrow. “A Hun’s perception is reality for him,” Attila allegedly declared, and so it is in Bushzarro world, where a man who hates the United Nations will be appointed as ambassador to that international forum, now deemed irrelevant by a camarilla of psychopathic barbarians in blue pinstriped suits and red ties.

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | 'Rape drug' used to rob thousands

'Rape drug' used to rob thousands

Tony Thompson, crime correspondent
Sunday December 19, 2004
The Observer

Up to 2,000 men and women are being robbed each year after having their drinks or food spiked with powerful sedatives, The Observer can reveal. According to one expert, drug-assisted robbery is now a much bigger problem than drug-assisted rape.

The figures come just days after 37-year-old Selina Hakki was found guilty of using Rohypnol to drug wealthy men and rob them of their clothes and accessories.

The mother of two, from Bow in east London, cruised top nightclubs and hotel bars to find her victims. Hakki, who could face life imprisonment when she is sentenced next month, is believed to be the first woman to be found guilty of using Rohypnol to drug men in Britain.

Hakki was convicted of two attacks that took place 16 months apart but police suspect she may have had other victims who are too embarrassed to come forward. They also believe other women may be targeting men in the same way.

Male victims are often targeted by women who lure them with the promise of sex. Many such men are married or in long-term relationships and are therefore reluctant to report the crime.

According to Graham Rhodes of the Roofie Foundation, an organisation set up in 1997 to help victims of drug-assisted rape and campaign for increased sentencing, there may be as many as 2,000 cases of drug-assisted robbery each year compared to about 900 incidents of drug-assisted rape. Although the drug is most commonly used by men against women, one-in-10 victims of drug-assisted sexual assault is male.
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'We are very much geared towards supporting victims of drug-assisted sexual assault and rape so those who have been robbed would not necessarily get in touch with us, but based on the calls we do get we estimate that the 900 cases represent only 30 per cent of drug-assisted crime and that most of the remaining 70 per cent involves some form of robbery,' Rhodes said.

'The scenarios are all very similar. We have had cases of people waking up in the street, in the toilet of a pub or at home to find all their valuables stolen. They often assume they simply had too much to drink and don't realise they have been the victim of an organised robbery.

'Christmas is a particularly busy time for this kind of activity because there are lots of people going out drinking who don't normally go out very much and therefore are less aware of the dangers of having their drinks spiked.'

Earlier this year a con artist, dubbed 'the cookie monster', was jailed for two-and-a-half years in Amsterdam. He robbed dozens of tourists after giving them biscuits laced with Rohypnol.

Last year Welsh football fans travelling to Moscow for the team's Euro 2004 qualifier were warned to be extra vigilant in pubs and bars after the British Embassy received a number of complaints from fans who had been robbed after their drinks were spiked with Rohypnol. In parts of Latin America the problem is so widespread that buses and trains carry signs warning tourists not to accept food or drink from strangers.

Rohypnol, available on the black market for as little as £1 per pill, is popular as a date-rape drug because it increases libido, does not fully incapacitate the victim and wipes out almost all memory of what has happened. GHB, also known as liquid ecstasy, has similar effects and is used for the same purpose.

Psychopathy and Consumerism

Psychopathy and Consumerism

Two Illnesses That Need And Feed Each Other

A psychopath or partial psychopath has an impaired capacity to form intimate, trusting mutually satisfying relationships with other human beings as a result of impaired attachment in the earliest years. Unable to find pleasure and satisfaction from others, the psychopath or partial psychopath must turn to things -- goods and services, toys and travel -- to fill the emptiness within. The emptiness of the hollow man must be filled, and consumerism has learned how. It is said that a culture creates the kind of people it needs. Maybe we're into frequent separations and changing, shared, paid caregivers in the first three years of the lives of our children so they will grow up with an insatiable need to shop till they drop. If you're unable to obtain satisfaction from BEING, which is based on love and the pleasure of sharing, then the HAVING MODE, as Eric Fromm put it, is your only choice. "The HAVING MODE, concentrates on material possession, acquisitiveness, power, and aggression and is the basis of such universal evils as greed, envy, and violence..." 1. PSYCHOPATHY Psychopathy: What is it? Introduction: An Interview with Dr. Barker The Mask of Sanity The Diagnostic and Statistical Manual Partial Psychopathy Incomplete Manifestations of the Disorder The Partial Psychopath If We Could Measure this Two Part Empathy Psychopathy: What Causes It? The Organic Red Herring How to Succeed in the Business of Creating Psychopaths How and Why Changing Caregivers Damage a Young Child Measuring Attachment The Diseases of Non-Attachment Empathic Care: A Definition of "Care" The Infant's Need for Empathic Care Deprivation of Empathic Care During Infancy Psychopathy: What's Wrong With It? Is There a Critical Mass for Psychopathy? The Psychopath's Favourite Playground 2. CONSUMERISM Consumerism: What Is It? Nonrational Influences Consumerism: What's Wrong With It? The Way Out of Mimicking Happiness Nirvana and Vance Packard Consumerism, Materialism and Cruelty to Children To Have or to Be? Big Brother Couldn't Foresee the Big C -- Consumerism You Can Never Get Enough ... The Poverty of a Rich Society Is This a Culture We Can Afford to be Complacent About 3. CHILDCARE The Link Between Consumerism and Psychopathy The Brave New World of Childcare Consumerism, Arbitrary Male Dominance and Daycare 4. IS DAYCARE REALLY A NECESSITY? Patriarchy The Real Culprits Women's Liberation and Cruelty to Children Sexism: A Dangerous Delusion Kiss Sleeping Beauty Goodbye Radical Feminism The Feminine Utopia Accepting the Existing Reality The Real Quislings in America Do Not Ask Mass Media The Socializing Mode of Childrearing From Socializing to Helping Mode of Childrearing The Evolution of Child-Rearing Modes Guidance: A Plea for Abandonment Social Science as Propoganda Social Science Over-reliance on Social Science for Proof The Role of Research A Dangerous Possibility Our Defense Mechanisms Our Defense Mechanisms The Problem of Professional Anxiety John: A Distressing Film About Separation 5. WHAT CAN BE DONE? Substituting Conserver Values for Consumer Values The Tendency to Confuse Difference with Equality A Return to the Roots of Feminism The Challenge Before Us A Sense of Communion The Politics of Meaning End of Introductory Interview with Dr. Barker

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