Form 20
                                                                                                                         Order 14, Rule 2
 

IN THE FEDERAL COURT OF AUSTRALIA

NEW SOUTH WALES DISTRICT REGISTRY                                                               No. NSD327 of 2001
 

                                                         JEREMY JONES
                                                          Applicant           

                                                             FREDRICK TÖBEN
                                                             Respondent          
 

1. I am the above Respondent in these proceedings and make reference to the Notice of Motion of 2 January 2008, the Amended Notice of Motion of 19 February 2008, to my Affidavits of 17 and 31 January, 19 February and 30 April 2008 wherein I contest the charges made against me in the Applicant’s originating Notice of Motion set down for 5 December 2006 and re-issued as Amended Statement of Charge/Amended Notice of Motion of 28 April 2006.

2. The Apology on 27 November 2007 was given by me in good faith, something that was abused by Applicant and his associates. As stated in Affidavit, 30 April 2008, I have no problem in deleting alleged offensive material.

3. I reject that I have been in contempt of court since the Orders were handed down on 17 September 2002 and will contest each of the allegations made against me, including those already deleted as per consent orders.

4. The following articles are an example of the broad range of topics covered within one email, most could be considered to be dealing with the concept “Holocaust” because it is so all-pervasive and defies a single definition. For example, it also applies to the Dresden Holocaust:

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4.1. Current threats stressed on Shoah Day

JPost.com Staff , THE JERUSALEM POST, Apr. 30, 2008

As Israel marked the start of Holocaust Remembrance Day under the shadow of Iran's nuclear program, President Shimon Peres said Wednesday that the world must act against global threats in order to ensure that the Holocaust never happens again.

"It is forbidden in history to be late," Peres said at the official state ceremony at Yad Vashem marking the opening of Holocaust Remembrance Day, noting that the world could have stopped Adolph Hitler had it acted in time. In his address, Peres urged state leaders to stop the eruption of global war before it began, in what aides said was a reference to Iran's nuclear program. "We will ask ourselves every morning what we must do in order that what was will never return again," Peres said.

The country's elder statesman said that until this very day he could not grasp how the Holocaust - where one third of the Jewish people was wiped out - could have happened, and how other nations stood silently by, or worse, assisted in the mass murder, adding that if Hitler had succeeded in building nuclear weapons, the world could have been destroyed.

Prime Minister Ehud Olmert blasted Holocaust deniers for trying to strip the legitimacy of the creation of the State Israel by denying the existence of the Holocaust, and said that no force in the world was stronger than the Israeli spirit. "Even 60 years later, who would believe that the ugly head of Jew hatred and Israel hatred is rearing all over the world; still inciting, poisoning and enticing."

He noted that the Holocaust only emphasized the need for the establishment of the State of Israel, which belatedly rose out of the ashes of the Holocaust. "There is no force in the world stronger than the spirit of this people, that emerged from the abyss of annihilation to the summits of creation, success, building and might of the State of Israel," Olmert said.

On Thursday, a two-minute siren will sound at 10 a.m. at the start of a series of day-long ceremonies throughout the nation. The official state wreath-laying ceremony will take place just after the siren is sounded Thursday at the Warsaw Ghetto uprising memorial at Yad Vashem in the presence of the prime minister and other VIPs. The "Unto Every Person There is a Name" ceremony will follow - in which Holocaust victims' names are read out - at both the Hall of Remembrance at Yad Vashem and the Knesset

http://www.jpost.com/servlet/Satellite?cid=1208870533584&pagename=JPost%2FJPArticle%2FShowFull

I did not always understand the enormity of the crime. It has been a gradual understanding, over the three decades of connection with the Jewish people, paralleling my development from childhood to adulthood. The things a child sees are different from what an adult chooses to notice - they are less political.

I had heard of the Holocaust for the first time when I was seven. At that time I heard adults talking of a very curious, terrifying phenomenon: soap made of humans. I was too scared to ask for details, but I heard the word Jews, and Hitler was mentioned too, both alien words to me.

But I still had not made the connection between Jews and the Holocaust. I had heard the word used to describe terrible results of battle, of scorched corpses of national heroes. For a young Greek child the word was one of horror, of absolute catastrophe and brilliant, destructive fires. Then in early 1978 I read in a magazine of an attack on a bus, in which many Jews were killed in a huge blaze. It was described in the article as a "holocaust." I was beginning to put together a picture of Jews, victims, fire.

Our first home in Israel was in the northern town of Nahariya. On the road to town stood a large building, a museum, where I was told 'human soap' was housed. For years, every time I passed by that building, I tried not to think about it. And when they talked about the Holocaust in school, I tried not to make the connection to that building. Instead I tried to focus on the name of the kibbutz where the museum was kept - and we were encouraged to think of its meaning: Lohamei HaGetaot (Ghetto Fighters). Somehow it made the horrors I imagined - because I still did not really know - seem acceptable. I rationalized it had been a battle, a war, full of glory and the death of heroes.

Over the years the narrative of heroism, victimhood, suffering and liberation, were not readily distinguishable to me. The order and proximity in which three days of commemoration fall, create a sense of historical order: Holocaust memorial is followed a week later by the memorial for the fallen soldiers of Israel, and immediately after by Independence Day celebrations. It is hard to miss the progression: we were persecuted for being Jews; we shed much blood to gain our independence; now we have a Jewish state. At a much later date, I also came to see an ominous warning in the progression: our lesson is that we will never again allow another Holocaust on our people - be warned.

The real change for me, the day I began to put it all together - the horror, the enormity, the narratives, the inhumanity and the perseverance - happened when I went to the store one day. The owner, a nice little old man who looked a bit like Yoda - Mr. Katz was his name - normally had long sleeved shirts on. One summer day even he succumbed to the heat wave. A barely discernible smudge on his arm, somewhere in the wrinkled old skin, stood out as he reached out to give me change. Mesmerized I stared and realized it was a number.

To me, the number came to symbolize the uniqueness of the Holocaust. It was no longer just genocide; it was something else, something for which I am still short of words. In retrospect I think that the number on the arm of Mr. Katz shocked me because it made him definitively unheroic. It stripped him of his identity, of his individualism as a human being. It encapsulated everything that organized extermination was about. The sort of killing that targets people without pathos, without feeling and afterthought: a mechanical, calculated massacre, with the kind of distance between victim and perpetrator that makes it seem almost banal.

Over the years I have had much criticism for the State of Israel. But, as time passed and I came to understand the Holocaust better, the more I realized that there are many out there who still do not fathom its horror, its uniqueness and its significance. This only strengthened my conviction in the need for a Jewish State. Indeed, I was not always a Zionist. But vitriol, hatred and ignorance of the sort uttered regularly by the likes of Iran's President, Hezbollah's leader and Hamas, have made me one. Their raw anti-Semitism, and its echoes around the world have led me to draw a red line: I can no longer imagine continued Jewish existence without the State of Israel.

I will continue criticizing Israel where I think it deserves it. And I will continue challenging the victorious, linear narratives of Jewish fanatics. The Holocaust does not make Jews or Israel infallible. Nor did the Holocaust alone make Israel - that is post-colonial gibberish of hateful extremists. But so long as there are those out there dreaming of another Holocaust, I know whose side I am on.

Most of the friends of my 95-year-old mother are no longer with us. With her insights, her power of survival, her talent for suppression and her uncanny ability to be here and to live only with the good times that preceded what she calls "then," I would not be surprised if the rest of her life, as she approaches the goal of great old age, is surprising.
Like most of her friends who were cataloged in Israel as survivors, remnants, people from the camps and ghettos and forced laborers who saved themselves, to the end of their days they were not saved.

The physical, and mainly the emotional wounds, their shattered lives, their world that had been destroyed, their dear ones who were torn away from them forever, turned them into shadows who walked and walk among us in disguise. And we, because of our inability to internalize the dimensions of the horror, and perhaps for fear of having to share the burden, find it difficult to make room in our hearts for genuine compassion.

There is a great degree of pretense on Holocaust Martyrs' and Heroes' Remembrance Day. Not because there is no intention of remembering it, but because a separation is made between the Holocaust as a general concept for the horror, and the people themselves: my mother, her friends, even the survivors who are forced to humiliate themselves in the face of the insensitivity of the governments and leaders of Israel, in order to merit, for example, crumbs of financial assistance.

They are humiliated not only because their voice has faded and their elbows are weak, but because in the roots of the Israeli consciousness, their place is missing because they scratch the false collective image of the new Israel.

In the 60 years since the establishment of the State, and the 63 years since the end of World War II, the collective consciousness has not understood that the destruction of European Jewry is one of the sources of strength for the existence of a Jewish state, and that those who were rescued from the inferno carry the resurrection on their backs. They are giants who are worthy of admiration and the true heroes of the 20th century.

Had they been perceived as such in the first place, we would not have been witness to fathers and mothers who concealed the history of the dark days from their offspring, and there would have been no need decades later to conduct special campaigns in order to take testimony from those who were still alive.

Their imprint is almost absent from the Israeli cultural legacy as well. Israeli dramaturgy, instead of being a leader in giving expression to the unparalleled human and collective tragedy, ignores it for the most part. As in a synchronized chord - literature, cinema, music and dance do the same. This is no coincidence. We grew up on the myth of power, whereas the Holocaust, due to a distorted perception of the founding fathers, was cataloged as weakness. "Like lambs to the slaughter." Only after several decades had passed, under pressure from the ghetto fighters, was any effort made to amend the concepts, and "heroism" was added to "Holocaust."

The speeches that will be delivered as they are every year have become loathsome. Not because they are not true, but because there is no clear connection between the literal truth and the truth of life; and therefore they are infuriating.

There is a need to admit that those who saved themselves from there did not really get a genuine embrace here. They walked among us, and the handful who remain still walk among us, by dint of existential inertia. Because there are no real Holocaust survivors.

The card index, which contains about 47 million documents containing the names of most concentration camp inmates, forced-labour victims and refugees left homeless after World War II, had been the subject of an intense debate. Jewish groups had been pressing for open access to the collection, a storehouse of captured documents that began being assembled in 1946.

"Most of the documents were drawn up by the Nazis themselves," said Reto Meister, the Swiss Red Cross official now in charge of the files. "We have documents here about a horrifyingly wide range of victims: Jews and Christians, Eastern and Western Europeans, Germans and non-Germans, men and women. There's not one country where victims did not come from."

Previously, viewing the archive was limited only to survivors and close relations of the dead. All of that changed last year, when the members of the 11-nation governing commission of the International Tracing Service of the International Committee of the Red Cross agreed to provide greater access to the archives, ending a five-decade long debate over the victims' rights to privacy.

Earlier this year, the archive opened to historians. Wednesday's opening allows nearly anyone to search inside the archives, an especially important event for those friends and family members still searching for those unaccounted for after the war.

Meister also sees the files as the most potent answer to Holocaust deniers: "Anyone who wants to minimize the Holocaust should come here. We'll show him documents by the million."

The "overwhelming scale" of the card index, Meister said, was more persuasive than any debate.

Creating a digital archive in three capitals

The ITS has also made digital copies of much of the archives and exported them to Yad Vashem Memorial in Jerusalem, the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington and the National Institute of Remembrance in Warsaw. The images include both sides of 9 million incarceration documents, 21 million cards from its main name index and 3.5 million papers in its displaced persons index.

Another block of documents relating to forced labour will follow in the summer, bringing scanning to 70 percent of the paper documents. The entire archival holdings are expected to be digitized by 2011 so that it can be mirrored in all three capitals.

DW Staff (cat)

Jewish leaders concocted the mass murder of handicapped Jews in order to keep from having to support them, and this murder is what the Jews term "the Holocaust," according to a documentary special that aired on April 18 on Hamas's Al Aqsa television station.

Palestinian Media Watch located and translated the contents of the footage, which it uploaded to YouTube under the headline "Hamas: Jews planned Holocaust."

According to the documentary's narrator, Israel's first prime minister David Ben Gurion decided that Jewish "disabled and handicapped are a burden to the state," after which "the Satanic Jews" - the film cuts to a picture of a hassidic Jew - "thought up an evil plot to be rid of the burden of disabled and handicapped" - the film then cuts to piles of emaciated corpses - "in twisted criminal ways."

"This is official Hamas TV," explained PMW director Itamar Marcus. "It's owned and totally controlled by the Hamas leadership in Gaza, and it goes out by satellite to the whole Arab-speaking world."

The program dealt primarily with the Holocaust, but included comparisons to the Palestinian situation, calling the massacres in the Sabra and Shatila refugee camps a "holocaust" and blaming Israel for a "Palestinian holocaust."

"They [the Jews] were the first to invent the methods of evil and oppression," explains the documentary's narrator, cutting to scenes of Golda Meir, Moshe Dayan and Ben Gurion.

The film claimed Jewish leaders blamed the Nazis for their own massacre of Jews "so the Jews would seem persecuted and try to benefit from international sympathy."

The film offers an "expert" - Amin Dabur, head of the "Center for Strategic Research" - who explains that "the Israeli Holocaust, the whole thing was a joke and part of the perfect show that Ben Gurion put on."

There is some tension in the film between blaming the Jews for the massacre of Jews, and denying the massacre took place. According to Dabur, Ben Gurion was interested in sending "strong and energetic youth [for Israel], while all the rest - the disabled, the handicapped, and people with special needs, they were sent [to die] - if it can be proven historically" - a reference to a claim heard often on Hamas television, from Iranian leaders and elsewhere in the Muslim world that the Holocaust has yet to be proven historically.

Continues Dabur: "They were sent [by the Jews to die] so there would be a Holocaust, so Israel could 'play' it for world sympathy."

Horst Mahler

Back in the slammer.

A regional court in Erding, outside of Munich, found that Horst Mahler had broken the law when he greeted journalist Michel Friedman with the words, "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman."

Friedman, who had previously served as the vice president of the Central Council of Jews in Germany, met Mahler in an airport hotel in October 2007 to speak with him for the German edition of Vanity Fair. A month later the magazine ran the conversation uncut, with a pre-emptive apology: "We're publishing this interview because we believe it to be an unparalleled exposé of German right-wing ideology -- even if (Mahler) says things that are illegal in Germany: (He) denies the Holocaust and uses a Hitler greeting."

Mahler began the interview with, "Heil Hitler, Herr Friedman." Friedman later filed a police report.

Mahler defended himself during the trial, denied the Holocaust again in open court on Monday and was ordered out of the room by the judge -- who called him "utterly incorrigible."

Nazi symbols, praise of Hitler and denial of the Holocaust are "anti-constitutional" in Germany and therefore against the law. But breaking these laws is nothing new for Mahler. When he started a jail sentence for a similar crime in 2006, he gave a stiff-armed salute just outside the gate. He had just finished that sentence last August when he met Friedman in October.

A Trapeze-Swing to the Right

Both men have high profiles. Friedman is a 52-year-old TV personality who stepped down as vice president of the Central Council of Jews in 2003 after a scandal involding drugs and prostitutes. His parents were saved from Auschwitz by German businessman Oskar Schindler.

Mahler is a 72-year-old lawyer with who has a long history of offending German sensibilities. During the 1970s he co-founded the far-left Red Army Faction, as a communist radical opposed to West Germany's so-called "Fascist state." He spent 14 years in jail for his involvement in various RAF-related crimes. Later he swung to the far right, and for a while, after 2000, served as a lawyer for the neo-Nazi National Democratic Party of Germany (NPD).

Charges against Mahler include sedition, using gestures of an anti-constitutional organization and criminal insult. Holocaust denial in Germany falls under the crime of sedition, or Volksverhetzung, because it's regarded as an incitement against Jews as an ethnic group.

During the interview he said, among other things: "Hitler was the liberator of the German people. He is demonized as the liberator of Satan." His statements roused criticism nationwide, and a lawsuit was lodged against Vanity Fair last November by a Holocaust survivor for providing Mahler with a platform for his extremist views.

BRUSSELS and NEW YORK, April 24 /PRNewswire-USNewswire/ -- The World Jewish Congress (WJC) strongly criticized the continued sale by the leading US online retailer Amazon.com of T-shirts praising Nazi dictator Adolf Hitler. I love Hitler shirts for children and women were still being sold on the Amazon.com website as of Thursday, 24 April 2008, 16:00 GMT. In January 2008, Amazon had pledged to remove offensive shirts following an article in the Czech weekly Tyden.

We are shocked and disgusted that Amazon.com is seemingly unwilling to stop the sale of such items, in spite of protests earlier this year. Not only is the slogan in bad taste, but to target children with clothes emblazoned with pro-Nazi slogans is particularly despicable, the WJCs Secretary-General Michael Schneider said. Companies have a responsibility. To make money with items glorifying the Nazis sets a very bad example. A lack of sensibility will ultimately do them serious damage as customers will rightly go and shop elsewhere.

Schneider called on Amazon to remove the entire collection of shirts from its website and to end its business relationship with the manufacturer of the line, Direct Collection to avoid any repetition of this or similar cases in the future. He added that the dramatic rise in hate speech via the internet could only be contained if all stakeholders in society, including businesses, took their responsibilities seriously. Lets hope Amazon heeds the call this time, said Schneider.

The WJC Secretary-General also called on internet operators to curb the dissemination of anti-Semitic material. When you see how much neo-Nazi and anti-Semitic material comes up through search engines such Google or on video platforms such as Youtube you are shocked, Schneider said. However, he expressed hope that companies will enter into dialogue on this important issue before things get worse.

Any attempt to incorporate Adolf Hitler into a work of fiction is inherently perilous. The historical, political and moral stakes simply are too high to admit even the small authorial misstep.

In "1940" -- his first novel in 20 years -- Jay Neugeboren traverses the Hitlerian tightrope with all the skill and formal daring that have made him one of our most honored writers of literary fiction and masterful nonfiction. This new book is, at once, a beautifully realized work of imagined history, a rich and varied character study and a subtly layered novel of ideas, all wrapped in a propulsively readable story.

Neugeboren builds his narrative around an actual historical figure from the periphery of Hitler's life -- Eduard Bloch, the Jewish doctor who was the Hitler family physician when the future dictator was growing up in the Austrian city of Linz. Bloch not only treated the young Adolf for a variety of boyhood ailments but also cared for his beloved mother, Klara, when she fell ill with breast cancer. Her last days were intensely painful, but Bloch apparently treated her with great care, providing daily pain medication and accepting little or no payment from the Hitler family, which had fallen on hard times.

After Klara's death, Adolf expressed his eternal gratitude to Bloch, first in person, then in hand-drawn cards sent from Vienna, where he failed as an art student. After the Anschluss, when Hitler made a triumphant return to Linz, he reportedly inquired about Bloch's welfare and declared him, "an Edeljude-- a noble Jew. If all Jews were like him, there would be no Jewish question." When the rest of the city's Jewish population was driven from their homes, Bloch remained under Gestapo protection, and though he no longer was allowed to treat gentile patients, he received the same food and clothing ration cards as other Germans.

Ultimately, his departure to the U.S. was personally approved by Hitler, and Bloch -- unlike other Jewish refugees -- was allowed to sell his house for a large sum and to take the money with him into exile.

He was 68 when he settled in the Bronx in 1940, and he lived there until his death five years later. In 1941 and 1943, Bloch was interviewed by the Office of Strategic Services for material incorporated into a psychological profile of Hitler. The doctor also wrote a controversially "positive" memoir of the young Hitler for Collier's Weekly, one in which he described him as quiet and well-mannered -- if a little melancholy -- and extraordinarily devoted to his mother.

Fact-based fiction

In "1940," Bloch speaks in the first-person through journal entries, many of those dealing with Hitler borrowed verbatim by Neugeboren from the OSS interviews. The story's other protagonist is Elisabeth Rofman, a skilled medical illustrator at Johns Hopkins whose father lives near Bloch in the Bronx and whose story is told in the third person. When Elisabeth returns home to visit her father and cook him a Shabbos dinner, he is missing. Bloch is soon involved in the hunt for the missing man, as is Rofman's ex-husband, a wealthy and unctuously observant physician, whose ostentatious religiosity contrasts with Bloch's assimilated German Judaism and Elisabeth's skeptical irreverence.

Boiling up between Rofman and her ex-husband is the novel's other major subplot -- what to do about their troubled son Daniel, who is confined to a Maryland "home" (read: mental hospital). The young man has begun to manifest what his doctors call inappropriate sexual aggressiveness. As a consequence, they wish to castrate him, and his father already has consented. Elisabeth refuses to give permission, and when Daniel escapes from the hospital, helps him find refuge with Bloch.

Skilled physician that the refugee is, he finds the young man troubled and eccentric, but hardly the schizophrenic his American doctors have diagnosed. Their desire to castrate him over an ambiguous sexual incident is a sobering reminder that eugenically motivated surgeries were as popular in the United States in that era as they were in Nazi Germany. The Germans simply were better at mobilizing state power to work their evil. In any event, the threat hanging over Daniel prods Bloch into sobering reflections on the ethics of medical collaboration with the state.

Neugeboren is marvelous at capturing the interplay between Rofman and her ex-husband, as well as between Bloch and Daniel. So too he gently evokes the affection that grows between Elisabeth and the much older refugee doctor. There's also a marvelous evocation of that rich melancholy that settled over the lives of the Central European, particularly German, Jewish exiles who fled Europe for the United States at the onset of World War II. Several times Neugeboren has Elisabeth, who speaks German, express her sympathy to Bloch over the loss of his beloved language in daily life. For his part, he remains stunned that his people -- so steeped in German culture -- have been rejected by that country's government.

Jews and Germans

Bloch, who was related to Franz Kafka, writes that Kafka "made the finer point: that the more Jews entered fully into German society -- the more we resembled them -- the more did they resent us. In specific, what Kafka, who, had he lived, would be more than a decade younger than I, wrote of our commonalities was this -- that we were, each of our peoples, ambitious, able, diligent, and thoroughly hated by others -- in his words: pariahs to the world.

"Kafka wrote this many years before Hitler came to power, when, as Kafka noted, other nations feared, admired, envied and ridiculed Germans much as they feared, admired, envied and ridiculed Jews, while it was only we Jews who actually seemed to love the Germans."

Both peoples, Bloch muses, "share a marked and common respect for the printed word -- we are The People of the Book, they The People of Poetry and Thought."

At one point, Bloch even wonders if it might be worth writing Hitler to remind him of their former connection -- it might prompt him to recall how vital the Jewish contribution to German culture had been and could be. History, however, intervenes to shatter that illusion.

Neugeboren's Bloch also reacts forcefully against a notion that some psychoanalysts (and historians under their influence) have advanced -- namely, that the origins of Hitler's murderous anti-Semitism lay in his resentment against the Jewish doctor who had failed to save the mother he loved above all other men and women. It's a reductionist notion that simply ignores history's evidence. If Hitler's hatred of Jews originated in that bit of personal history, how does one explain the equally murderous bigotry of, say, Goebbels or Himmler?

Part of the power of this intelligently and finely wrought novel is that such thoughts and questions arise unforced from the story, as though from life itself.

http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/la-et-rutten30apr30,0,3061942.story

By many definitions, treatment that drives people insane would constitute “torture.” But, when the US ratified the UN Convention Against Torture and other Cruel, Inhuman, or Degrading Treatment or Punishment, they adopted reservations to the treaty that restricted the definition of torture to potentially exclude such cases. Thus they stated that

[I]n order to constitute torture, an act must be specifically intended to inflict severe physical or mental pain or suffering and that mental pain or suffering refers to prolonged mental harm caused by or resulting from (1) the intentional infliction or threatened infliction of severe physical pain or suffering; (2) the administration or application, or threatened administration or application, of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality; (3) the threat of imminent death; or (4) the threat that another person will imminently be subjected to death, severe physical pain or suffering, or the administration or application of mind altering substances or other procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or personality.

Given this definition, the question of whether confinement at Guantanamo is torture depends upon whether one can make a good argument that this confinement is among procedures calculated to disrupt profoundly the senses or the personality.

One certainly could argue that behavior, such as that described in the Times, [e.g., ‘I'm talking to the ceiling now,'] constitutes a profound disruption of the senses, making it “torture,” even according to the restricted US definition.

In its defense, the US, according to the Times, is apparently distorting statistics of the rate of mental illness there. An additional tactic used by military health representatives I have heard is to claim that many of the emotional problems among detainees are do to what are called “personality disorders.” This is clever because personality disorders, by definition, have been present for many years, thus predating imprisonment in hell, er, Guantanamo.

As the military confirms, the vast majority of Guantanamo detainees are housed in extremely harsh conditions invoving near permanent isolation for years on end:

According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American [supermax] prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.

Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.

But, in the Alice-in-Wonderland world that is Guantanamo and other US national security detention facilities, nothing is as it seems. The military are trying to prove the Humpty Dumpty correct that “When I use a word,” Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone. “It means just what I choose it to mean - neither more or less.” Thus, as described by an attorney, while at Guantanamo,

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States.

The military prosecutor claims, however,

that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.”

The literary genre of prison memoirs from Stalinist concentration camps among others is full of accounts of people able to “communicate through walls.” Never before have I heard a claim as brazen as that this flaw in the system of total isolation did not make being locked up alone for years on end in an 8′ by 12′ cell for 22 hours a day “solitary confinement.”

This article does not even mention the existence of another “camp,” the super-secret Camp 7 the existence of which was only admitted by the military to the Associated Press last February. While details about conditions at Camp 7 are unavailable, we can only assume that they are even more brutal than those at Camps 5 and 6 that are described in this Times article.

This past February the American Psychological Association amended their 2007 anti-torture resolution to unequivocally condemn the use of prolonged isolation as unethical. Unfortunately, the APA regularly condemns torture in the abstract but to date has not had a word to say about real, existing, US torture. The APA could give this resolution some concrete meaning by issuing an amicus brief supporting the attempts of these detainees to be moved to less harsh settings, where interaction is allowed. Further, the APA resolution’s states that:

Psychologists are absolutely prohibited from knowingly planning, designing, participating in or assisting in the use of all condemned techniques at any time and may not enlist others to employ these techniques in order to circumvent this resolution’s prohibition.

If this resolution means anything, it means that psychologists are forbidden from participating in any way in activities at Guantanamo’s Camps 5 and 6, where prolonged isolation is the rule. It is time for the APA to speak loud and clear to state, consistent with its own resolutions, that psychologists may not participate in any capacity in these facilities.

However, the APA has consistently asserted that psychologists, rather than aiding abuse, are playing a vital role in protecting detainees. As their military-dominated task force on Psychological Ethics and National Security [PENS] asserted in 2005:

It is consistent with the APA Code of Ethics for psychologists to serve in consultative roles to interrogation- or information-gathering processes for national security-related purposes. While engaging in such consultative and advisory roles entails a delicate balance of ethical considerations, doing so puts psychologists in a unique position to assist in ensuring that such processes are safe and ethical for all participants.

After three long years of revelations about the abuses occurring in US detention facilities and psychologists roles in those abuses, APA leaders are still making this ridiculous claim that psychologists aiding detainee interrogations are primarily protecting detainees.

For years APA members have been pushing for a policy that would bar psychologist participation at Guantanamo, the CIA’s “black sites,” or other facilities outside the reach of the Constitution and international law. [APA members should go here and sign a petition calling for a referendum putting that policy into effect.] However, this policy change, while highly desirable, would be less critical if APA would actually enforce the policies it already has in place that, by any reasonable interpretation, clearly ban participation in Camps 5 and 6, as well as Camp 7. Unfortunately, the APA has a long history of talk against torture, but they have taken few steps to walk the walk. They appear to be dragging their feet until the Bush administration is long gone before taking any position on the well-known abuses of this administration. Perhaps this time they’ll act on the sides of ethics and of human decency and speak out when it might make a difference.

Next month, Salim Ahmed Hamdan, a Yemeni who was once a driver for Osama bin Laden, could become the first detainee to be tried for war crimes in Guantánamo Bay, Cuba. By now, he should be busily working on his defense.

But his lawyers say he cannot. They say Mr. Hamdan has essentially been driven crazy by solitary confinement in an 8-foot-by-12-foot cell where he spends at least 22 hours a day, goes to the bathroom and eats all his meals. His defense team says he is suicidal, hears voices, has flashbacks, talks to himself and says the restrictions of Guantánamo “boil his mind.”

“He will shout at us,” said his military defense lawyer, Lt. Cmdr. Brian L. Mizer. “He will bang his fists on the table.”

His lawyers have asked a military judge to stop his case until Mr. Hamdan is placed in less restrictive conditions at Guantánamo, saying he cannot get a fair trial if he cannot focus on defending himself. The judge is to hear arguments as soon as Monday on whether he has the power to consider the claim.

Critics have long asserted that Guantánamo’s climate-controlled isolation is a breeding ground for madness. But turning that into a legal claim marks a new stage for the military commissions at Guantánamo. As military prosecutors push to get trials under way, they are being met with challenges not just to the charges, but to Guantánamo itself.

Pentagon officials say that Guantánamo holds dangerous men humanely and that there is no unusual quantity of mental illness there. Guantánamo, a military spokeswoman said, does not have solitary confinement, only “single-occupancy cells.”

In response to questions, Cmdr. Pauline A. Storum, the spokeswoman for Guantánamo, asserted that detainees were much healthier psychologically than the population in American prisons. Commander Storum said about 10 percent could be found mentally ill, compared, she said with data showing that more than half of inmates in American correctional institutions had mental health problems.

With their filings, Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers are setting the stage for similar challenges to the procedures of Guantánamo in some 80 expected war crimes cases, lawyers for other detainees say. “The issue of mistreatment of prisoners, the miserable lives they live in these cells, will come up in every case,” said Clive Stafford Smith, a lawyer for 35 detainees.

The case of Salim Hamdan is already a landmark because the Supreme Court used an earlier case against him to strike down the Bush administration’s first military commission system in 2006. But that case, like most of the legal battles over Guantánamo, did not affect conditions there.

Detainees lawyers argue that the effects of intense isolation have gradually turned the prison camp into something of a highly fortified mental ward. Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers say his place as one of the best-known detainees has not spared him.

In more than six years of detention, Mr. Hamdan has had two phone calls to his family and no visits. He has been disciplined, legal filings say, for having a Snickers bar that was given to him by his lawyers and for possessing too many socks.

“Conditions are asphalt, excrement and worse,” he wrote his lawyers in February. “Why, why, why?”

At Guantánamo, there are no family visits, no televisions and no radios. A new policy will for the first time permit one telephone call a year.

In the cells where Mr. Hamdan and more than 200 of Guantánamo’s 280 detainees are held, communication with other detainees is generally by shouting through the slit in the door used for the delivery of meals. Mail is late and often censored, lawyers say.

Conditions are more isolating than many death rows and maximum-security prisons in the United States, said Jules Lobel, a law professor at the University of Pittsburgh who is an expert on American prison conditions.

The military prosecutors declined to comment on the claims about Mr. Hamdan’s condition. As is common at Guantánamo, their legal filings were not made public before the scheduled court date. But defense filings released by Mr. Hamdan’s lawyers recited some prosecution arguments.

The prosecutors argued that the way that Mr. Hamdan was being held did not constitute solitary confinement in part because “detainees can communicate through the walls.” They said that Mr. Hamdan had denied having mental problems and that he was no model detainee, spitting at guards, threatening assault and throwing urine.

Speaking generally, Commander Storum said, detainees are enemy combatants held safely. “We are holding the right people,” she added, “in the right place, for the right reasons, and doing it the right way.”

Prosecutors have said Mr. Hamdan, now about 39, helped Mr. bin Laden elude capture after the 2001 terror attacks. He is charged with transporting weapons for Al Qaeda and being a bin Laden bodyguard and driver.

In recent weeks, his case has drawn wide notice because the defense asserted that senior Pentagon officials exerted improper influence over military prosecutors and pressed cases for political reasons. Hearings on that issue, also scheduled for next week, may expose the internal workings of the military commissions. The former chief Guantánamo prosecutor, Col. Morris D. Davis, who has become a critic of the way the war crimes system is run, is slated to testify for Mr. Hamdan.

But the claim about Mr. Hamdan’s mental health could expose the workings of Guantánamo. According to military statistics, three-quarters of the detainees have been held recently in two “camps” that look much like American prisons. Camp 5 and Camp 6, heavily guarded concrete buildings, hold men who have yet to face trial. Behind a heavy door, each cell has a handful of sanctioned items including a cup and a Koran.

Officials concede that the daily two hours of recreation in a chain-link pen is sometimes offered in the dark. From inside their cells, detainees cannot see the outdoors. From the exercise pens they sometimes can see only a sliver of sky.

Michael E. Mone Jr., a Boston lawyer, visited a client last month in Camp 5, where Mr. Hamdan is held. Mr. Mone said his client, an Uzbek detainee, asked why he could not be held in a place where he could see the sun.

This winter, lawyers for Abdulghappar Turkistani, a detainee in Camp 6, received a letter describing life there. “Losing any contact with anyone,” he wrote, “also being forbidden from the natural sunlight, natural air, being surrounded with a metal box all around is not suitable for a human being.”

Reporters are not permitted to interview detainees, and some international groups, like Amnesty International, have been denied access to detainees.

In leaked reports in 2004 investigators for the International Committee of the Red Cross, who do see detainees, said their treatment, including solitary confinement, amounted to torture. But the Red Cross usually keeps its conclusions private.

As a result, much of what is known about current conditions at Guantánamo comes from lawyers, who visit regularly under tight restrictions. Many describe the men as depressed or delusional. Some, they say, show obvious signs of what some of them call Guantánamo psychosis.

Four detainees are believed to have committed suicide in 2006 and 2007, but the military has never released the official details.

Some of the men are increasingly paranoid and some are losing touch with reality, said Rebecca P. Dick, a Washington lawyer who visited two Afghan detainees in March. “One client said, ‘I’m talking to the ceiling now,’ ” Ms. Dick recalled.

Six detainees, according to military officials, are now on hunger strikes. They are fed liquid nutrition through tubes inserted in their nostrils daily.

Mr. Stafford Smith said one of his clients, a hunger striker, was fixated on a mathematical formula that he believed proves that he will be the next to die.

Another detainee, Mr. Stafford Smith said, has smeared feces on his cell walls. “When I asked him why he was doing it, he told me he had no idea,” Mr. Stafford Smith said.

Last month a lawyer for nine detainees who are members of China’s Uighur ethnic minority told a Congressional committee that one of them, Huzaifa Parhat, said that life at Guantánamo was like having already died. The lawyer, P. Sabin Willett, said Mr. Parhat asked the lawyers to pass on a message. He told them to tell his wife to remarry.

Military officials often dismiss such descriptions as accounts by gullible lawyers manipulated by terrorists trained to make false claims of mistreatment.

Detainees’ lawyers say the military methodically understates the mental illness at Guantánamo for public relations reasons.

In military commission proceedings in recent weeks, there have been hints that some of the men facing charges may be deteriorating psychologically.

A military lawyer for a Sudanese detainee said her client appeared frantic and asked that he be evaluated.

When a judge asked a Saudi detainee the name of a lawyer, the detainee’s answer was: “I have been here for six years. Thank God I can even still remember the names of my own family.”

But Mr. Hamdan’s case is the first in the current system to try to air fully the claim that Guantánamo is warping the minds of the men held there.

Commander Mizer said Mr. Hamdan talked unendingly about his desire to moved to Camp 4, the only place at Guantánamo where detainees are permitted to live communally. Camp 4 is believed to house 50 or fewer detainees who officials classify as highly compliant. Mr. Hamdan blames his lawyers for failing to get him out of Camp 5, Commander Mizer said, and will talk only about that. “He refuses to talk about his case,” he said.

The trial is now set to begin on May 28. But twice in recent months, Commander Mizer said, Mr. Hamdan has said he was dismissing Commander Mizer from the case. “He said, ‘I don’t ever want to see you again,’ ” Commander Mizer said.

There is only one subject, he said, that Mr. Hamdan discusses: Getting out of his cell in Camp 5 at Guantánamo Bay.

Stephen Soldz: Psychoanalyst, Psychologist, Researcher, and Activist –

http://psychoanalystsopposewar.org/ 

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